DOGE dodge and the Idaho Legislature
It doesn't completely make no sense but here's why it comes close to that
Several people have asked my opinion on Idaho’s new DOGE taskforce. I haven’t been terribly inclined to address it because it’s kind of boring, but I do like to respond to readers, so here goes:
The folks at the Idaho Freedom Foundation say that Idaho doesn’t have a revenue problem; it has a spending one. Fred Birnbaum wrote an excellent article on this point. But it’s more than that.
Idaho has not only a spending problem; it has a Legislature problem. And DOGE will only be so good as its ability to conquer that, to wit:
Idaho lawmakers have next to no time whatsoever to consider the governor’s spending recommendations. Under state law, the Legislature is to get a copy of his proposal within five days after the start of the legislative session in January. A bill introduced in the last legislative session would have moved the governor’s transmittal date to Dec. 1, but it never went anywhere, which is too bad. So in the midst of the legislative session, which generally goes until about the end of March, lawmakers are supposed to examine the ins and outs of some $14 billion in state spending. How is that going for them? Not so well.
As a result of this and an unwillingness to truly challenge the governor’s budget recommendations, there’s not been a real fight over the budget in years. The last times I can remember the budget being a battle was 2003 and 2011. Typically, the governor’s budget recommendation is exactly what gets passed into law. Most of this is due to a lack of time as well as an unwillingness to really challenge the governor, who is the titular head of the Republican Party.
Lawmakers do have a lot of opportunities to really dive into state spending, and they basically miss all of them. The Legislature’s policy committees also double as oversight committees for the various agencies that they cover. Rarely do committees do this work. Yes, the agriculture committees and the education committees will hear from various “stakeholder” groups. They’ll listen to reports from agencies on occasion. But they almost never ask agencies about their spending or budgets.
As the state budget has grown, so has the use of accounting gimmicks to make the rate of increase year over year look smaller. A lot of spending takes place in the form of transfers from the general fund, reductions to revenue, or “continuously appropriated” spending (now totaling about $2.9 billion) that gets no oversight at all. The incentives to keep this system in place are high — for lawmakers and the governor. It’s fun to tell constituents that the budget only grew by X% when it actually grew at a larger level but off the books.
The entire budgeting process in state government is focused on growth. To the degree lawmakers obsess over anything having to do with the budget, they’re obsession is with “enhancements” — or additions — to the base budget. The base, which contains spending previously authorized, gets almost no scrutiny. There are some attempts underway in the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee to remedy this, but I’ve heard talk of such efforts for years that have gotten stale for lack of follow through.
The Idaho DOGE effort is being steered by the Legislature, not by outside examiners, as was the case with Elon Musk’s federally-focused project. This is kind of like putting the CIA in charge of the investigation into JFK’s assassination. The result will only be so good as the conflict of interest the lead group has in the work. The Legislature’s conflict is huge. If they don’t bring in outside experts — or if they just travel the state holding hearings, which I’m willing to bet is part of the plan — this effort will fail hard.
Moreover, this is not the first attempt, nor is it the first failed attempt, to make state government more efficient. In 1972, voters passed a constitutional amendment to limit the number of state departments to 20. This clearly didn’t cut the size of government. Today, whenever a new state agency is proposed, the Legislature merely makes sure to fit it into one of the existing departments, lest the constitutionally-set maximum number of departments be exceeded.
In 2002, Gov. Dirk Kempthorne commissioned a Blue Ribbon Taskforce to examine government efficiency. Nothing really came from this except the shotgun wedding of the Department of Labor and the Department of Commerce in 2004. They divorced a few years later. But lawmakers have known forever — without needing a special committee to tell them — that it makes no sense for the Blind Commission to be entirely separate from the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, for example. People have known such things for years.
State Controller Brandon Woolf has a really good state transparency website that allows anyone to review state spending in detail and ask questions. In fact, a lot of state spending information is online. If Idaho lawmakers were really interested in getting at waste, fraud, and abuse, or just making government more efficient (a term I despise as it applies to government) they wouldn’t need a new committee of lawmakers to do it. They’d just need a commitment of time and a desire to ask deep questions about spending — questions that they generally have refused to ask, even though that has always been their jobs, even long before DOGE was a thing.
Will having a taskforce make a difference? The answer is not no. But it’s not yes either. A better project for the Legislature’s DOGE taskforce would be to examine its own systems that allow waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiency to flourish under its watch.
If you’re still not convinced that the Idaho Legislature, as an institution, is just completely bonkers, consider this:
The Idaho DOGE taskforce wasn’t created by act of the Legislature. A bill to create the taskforce passed the House but stalled in the Senate. After the legislative session ended, legislative leadership in the House simply announced one day “oh by the way, we’re doing this taskforce thing.”
Why does the Legislature exist in the first place if a bill to do a thing can fail to pass but that thing happens anyway?
Below, for paid subscribers, I’ll give just one example of Idaho government waste and why getting rid of it gets messy:
