The Wisconsin DOGE Project: IRG Renews Call for Modernizing and Decentralizing State Government
With elections settled, state lawmakers and Governor Evers are starting to work on the 2025 state budget and policy goals. With this, we at the Institute for Reforming Government are renewing our calls from 2023 for lawmakers to modernize and realign state government for the needs of the 21st century. As DOGE gets to work in Washington, D.C., it's time for Wisconsin to renew its reputation as a national leader in reform and begin the Wisconsin DOGE Project.
In 2024, IRG polling found that Wisconsinites want more oversight over the bureaucracy:
- 73% agreed that state agencies should review new regulations before they are enacted.
- 67% favored having regulations expire after seven years unless they are re-approved by the legislature.
In early 2023, IRG released an in-depth encyclopedia of the 20 largest agencies in state government. This catalog lays the foundational knowledge needed to see the problems plaguing Wisconsin's executive branch.
Wisconsinites across the board want their representatives in Madison to check the growth of state government—IRG has a plan to make that happen.
"With renewed attention on right-sizing government and reducing unnecessary bureaucracy at the federal level, it's time for state lawmakers to seriously rethink how state agencies operate as well," said Chris Reader, Executive Vice President of the Institute for Reforming Government. "We released a plan to rethink, reorganize, and modernize state agencies in 2023. It was DOGE before DOGE was cool. With voters distrusting the bureaucracy, Governor Evers and lawmakers have a great opportunity in 2025 to listen to voters and reimagine state government."
Highlights of IRG’s 2023 plan include:
- Reducing the number of full-time employees by contracting out for professional services, finding operational redundancies, and integrating automation.
- Scaling back the physical footprint in Madison by moving agencies into the communities they serve, making remote work more accountable, and consolidating office space.
- Making state government more responsive by creating a network of “one-stop shops,” a single digital access portal for all services, and reforming the civil service system.
IRG will release more on the Wisconsin DOGE Project in the coming weeks and months as lawmakers begin writing the next state budget.
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This is absolutely wonderful!
When it comes to government efficiency, I can give you a firsthand example of how it can be improved and prove it. I got elected to the Trempealeau County board quite a few years back and with the help of another board member, we decided that there were massive amounts of money left in each department's budget just over halfway through the year, they had only spent a little over 20% of their budget. We were close to 3/4 of the way through the year. So after a meeting with the executive finance committee of which I was one member, we decided to ask them to show us ahead of time how much they were going to spend out of their budget and what it was for before they spent it. At the full county board meeting we voted on doing this and were told that was too petty and would not allow us to do that. So we just made the information known that we were going to be watching their budgets very closely, at the end of the year most of them did not reach 80% of their budget that they had been spending for years. I don't think that anything else in this story needs clarification, money gets spent in government because it is there and because they have it and because if they don't spend it they're going to lose it and they don't care because it's not their money
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