In statehouses across the country, legislators, policy analysts, and commentators are all asking: “Could (or should) we have a Department of Government Efficiency in state government like Donald Trump just created?”
To be candid, part of the biggest obstacle I’ve come across with a state version of DOGE is that too few people can break the concept away from Elon Musk. To be clear, you don’t have to find a person who no one ever invited to parties in high school but who everyone wanted to copy homework from to head it up.
Case in point: Virginia’s Office of Regulatory Management. According to a story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on April 21, the reforms that the Office of Regulatory Management already has enacted saved Virginia $105 million just in procurement costs alone. Reforms included streamlining permitting, application, and reimbursement processes for businesses, among many other reforms.
Caleb Taylor, policy director for the Virginia Institute for Public Policy told The Daily Signal that, like the Department of Government Efficiency’s origins tracing back to an agency originally created to fix the failed rollout of Obamacare’s healthcare.gov website during the Obama administration, Virginia’s Office of Regulatory Management started as a pilot program under Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam.
“[Gov. Northam’s pilot program] was actually a really good program. It worked really well. … So, we started talking about, How can we expand this? And we went through a number of different iterations. What we didn’t realize, and maybe we should have, was how wildly successful the office was going to be, and I give a lot of credit to that, to the governor.”
Reeve Bull is “Virginia’s Elon Musk,” better known as the director of the Office of Regulatory Management. He receives much of the credit but often deflects it to the government departments that he says self-identify where savings can be found—either through more efficient processes or streamlined policies.
Taylor points out that much of the costs and regulations that strangle job creation are not federal. “The states have a lot more regulatory power than most people realize. The problem is that internal to the agencies, to the regulatory agencies at the state level—any level—there is a perverse incentive to continue regulating. And so, we end up with what’s called regulatory accumulation, and this is a problem in every single state.”
He adds that this accumulation has a particularly bad side effect: “We’ve got regulations that, there’ll be a regulation in the Energy Department and a regulation of the Environmental Quality Department that directly oppose one another. And if you’re compliant with one regulation, you’re not compliant with another.”
In real world figures, the amount of money that’s being spent on compliance costs for the average Virginian who wants to start a business, get a business license, build a home, build a shopping center, or whatever, is significant. Since its creation, through its permitting and other reforms, the Office of Regulatory Management has been able to, for example, decrease the cost for a builder to build a house in the state by $24,000 before a shovel is ever put into the ground.
Taylor insists that the regulators are the ones driving this change and don’t necessarily need external incentives, based on research done by Dr. James Broughel, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Broughel wrote a policy paper for the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, “The Virginia Model of Regulatory Reform: A Roadmap for Success.”
In it, he argues: “Fundamentally, the No. 1 thing that regulators are supposed to do beyond making the regulations is enforcing them. They’re the investigators. They’re the ones that are paying attention to whether you’re not licensed, or they’re the ones that are paying attention to if you’re polluting the river with your building project, or something like that. So, these are the guys that are doing that work.
“And when this [work] becomes so much more concise, that job becomes so much easier. And so, it creates this opportunity, I think, for the agencies. And we’ve seen this in a number of different places, not just in the United States, but in Canada and elsewhere like Japan, as well.”
So, in practice, when encouraged to look, regulators are more adept at finding the overlapping and contradictory rules for their agencies to remove.
So yes, Virginia, there is a DOGE Claus. You just may not have heard of him because he has been busy saving you money.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
