Category: Doge
DOGE didn’t die — it moved to the states
The media and conservative pundits may have buried the Department of Government Efficiency, but they have yet to carve a date of death on its tombstone. While DOGE in Washington may have appeared to insiders as a vanity project, voters saw it as a mandate — one that Republicans at the federal level have largely set aside in favor of politics as usual.
But activists have not forgotten. In red states across the country, they are still demanding accountability. And in Idaho, that pressure is finally producing results.
If Idaho can succeed and follow Florida’s lead, there is no serious reason other red states cannot do the same — unless they are prepared to admit they never intended to keep their promises.
For what appears to be the first time, state legislators serving on Idaho’s DOGE Task Force concluded their 2025 work with a meeting that departed from months of cautious, procedural discussion. Members asked harder questions, voiced long-simmering frustrations, and issued a recommendation that could reshape the state’s fiscal future: urging the full legislature to consider repealing Medicaid expansion, a costly policy that has drained taxpayers of millions.
Red states can’t stall forever
Idaho may not be Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ DOGE-style reforms have produced consistent wins for fiscal sanity and limited government. But it is doing more than other red states, such as North Dakota, where a DOGE committee stacked with Democrats predictably ignored the voters’ mandate.
The Idaho meeting exposed growing dissatisfaction with the task force’s approach. Over the summer and fall, the committee — charged with identifying inefficiencies — repeatedly deferred to state agencies for suggestions on cuts. Unsurprisingly those agencies offered little beyond cosmetic changes.
Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott (R-LD2, Blanchard) gave voice to that frustration. “What is the goal of this committee?” she asked, pressing colleagues to offer recommendations that actually matter. “Twenty thousand here, 50,000 there, or removing old code is not meaningful efficiency,” Scott said. Repealing Medicaid expansion, she argued, would be one of the “best decisions” the state could make.
Nibbling at the edges
Scott’s experience on the Idaho task force stands in stark contrast to the early federal DOGE efforts, which moved aggressively to slash U.S. Agency for International Development’s workforce, freeze fraudulent payments, and cancel billions in corrupt contracts. By comparison, Idaho’s task force had mostly nibbled at the edges. This recommendation marked its first serious step toward substantive reform.
Another revealing moment came from co-chairman state Sen. Todd Lakey (R-Nampa), who read a letter from a small-business owner offering health insurance to employees. Workers routinely request schedules capped at 20 to 28 hours per week to preserve Medicaid expansion benefits — even though full-time work would require only a modest contribution toward employer-provided coverage.
The result is a perverse incentive structure: businesses struggle to find full-time workers while taxpayers subsidize underemployment. The government fuels workforce shortages through welfare, then spends more taxpayer dollars trying to fix the shortages it created. This welfare-workforce vortex is the opposite of efficiency, and it is spreading nationwide.
The meeting’s most explosive moment came from state Rep. Josh Tanner (R-Eagle), who described Idaho’s Medicaid reimbursement structure as resembling “money laundering.”
Citing analysis from the Paragon Health Institute, Tanner explained how provider assessment fees allow states to inflate Medicaid spending to draw down larger federal matching funds, cycling the money back through enhanced payments. Paragon has described these arrangements as “legalized money laundering” — schemes that shift costs to federal taxpayers while enriching connected providers or funding unrelated priorities.
Nationally supplemental payments now exceed $110 billion annually, siphoning hundreds of billions from taxpayers over a decade.
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Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
DOGE’s second life
My sources tell me that hospital lobbyists went into panic mode after the meeting, urgently contacting Capitol officials to contain the fallout from Tanner’s remarks.
For the first time, the task force aired real frustrations, documented real harms, and named real abuses. That alone offers reason for cautious optimism.
Idaho now has committed conservatives in positions of influence. With the task force’s recommendation to revisit Medicaid expansion heading to the legislature, the state has an opportunity to govern as it campaigns — preserving liberty, restoring accountability, and expanding opportunity.
If Idaho can succeed and follow Florida’s lead, there is no serious reason other red states cannot do the same — unless they are prepared to admit they never intended to keep their promises in the first place.
DOGE program is successfully shrinking the federal workforce, new jobs report suggests
Following some significant delays due to the Democrat-imposed government shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has finally released its long-anticipated jobs report for November and October.
On Tuesday, the November jobs report, including partial data from October, was released, showing an unemployment rate at 4.6%, up 0.2 percentage points since September 2025 and up 0.4 percentage points since November of last year.
‘The report on December’s employment data, released in early January ahead of the next meeting, will likely be a much more meaningful indicator for the Fed when it comes to deciding the near-term trajectory.’
The labor market reportedly added 64,000 jobs after losing 105,000 jobs in October, according to available data.
Most of the jobs lost came from the federal government as part of DOGE’s buyout program, which went into effect at the end of September. Government employees who opted into the buyout were still listed as employed until their scheduled exit in October.
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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
CNN explained that federal employment dropped precipitously in October, with 162,000 jobs lost, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s work. DOGE’s “fork in the road” deferred resignation policy reportedly went into effect on September 30, though it was established earlier in the year.
The new report was originally scheduled to be released on December 5, but the release was delayed due to the 43-day government shutdown which affected data collection for both October and November.
Given the delays and fragmented data, experts have suggested that the November 2025 jobs report will not pull much weight in the Federal Reserve’s decision-making.
Kay Haigh, global co-head of fixed income and liquidity solutions at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, told Fox News: “Chair [Jerome] Powell commented last week that the report would likely be affected by shutdown-related distortions, making it a less reliable gauge of the labor market’s health than usual. The report on December’s employment data, released in early January ahead of the next meeting, will likely be a much more meaningful indicator for the Fed when it comes to deciding the near-term trajectory.”
The jobs report for December is set to be published on January 9.
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DOGE Succeeded, Just Not For The Reasons You Think
DOGE Succeeded, Just Not For The Reasons You Think
Schumer’s Shutdown Is Empowering Trump To Drain The Swamp
The president’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce have gone into overdrive, and it is all thanks to Democrats in Congress.
