Gov. Cox signs executive order to launch GRIT, Utah's take on DOGE

Yahoo

09-05-2025

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and his cabinet hold a news conference to announce GRIT, a new government efficiency initiative, at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on May 9, 2025. (Courtesy of the Governor's Office)
Gov. Spencer Cox signed an executive order on Friday launching a new government efficiency initiative called GRIT — Utah's take on DOGE.
But when pressed on whether it will lead to employee layoffs, Cox said he didn't expect so because he sees the Government Reform, Innovation and Transparency project as yet another budgeting exercise on top of several that state leaders already practice to spend taxpayer dollars wisely in Utah's $30.8 billion budget.
'I'm not out there looking to just cut a whole bunch of jobs,' Cox told reporters during a news conference at the Utah Capitol, though he added, 'we may need to move some people in some other ways that will be better. … But we're trying to empower our employees to make things better, not trying to make our employees scared of their jobs.'
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But 'the short answer is yes,' Cox said when asked whether GRIT was Utah's version of the Department of Government Efficiency that was launched under President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to slash federal spending.
However, Cox also said he hesitated to directly compare the two initiatives, because Utah leaders already do 'about 10 things every year that the federal government hasn't done in about 50 years' to audit government programs for efficiency.
'DOGE is awesome and I desperately want DOGE to work,' Cox said. 'We have a bloated federal government that is a disaster. We've been begging for something like DOGE for decades, and I'm so excited that it's actually happening.'
But as far as Utah is concerned, he said, 'we do DOGE like six times a year in this state every single year.'
'We DOGE the hell out of our budget every single year,' Cox said, to chuckles from his cabinet leadership members standing behind him. 'We were DOGE before DOGE was a thing. We were DOGE when it wasn't cool, and we will be DOGE long after it is cool.'
The Republican-controlled state already has several layers of yearly budgeting processes where both the executive and legislative branches hunt for cuts.
The governor's office does it while preparing its budget recommendation to the Legislature. Lawmakers sitting on legislative committees go through their own process, line item by line item. Then legislative leaders on the powerful Executive Appropriations Committee make the near-final decisions, deciding what new funding requests get prioritized, what doesn't, and what should be cut. Then the Utah Legislature votes as a whole on the state's budget, which is balanced every single year. Finally, the governor can also use his pen to veto budget line items, if he wishes.
Plus, legislative auditors also pick several agencies a year to find inefficiencies, which Cox likened to 'going to get your physical exam when you're 50.'
So why GRIT? Cox said it's because 'the question I always have is, how can we be better?'
'You don't stay No. 1 by just doing the things that you've always done,' he said. 'We have to be constantly improving.'
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That was one piece of praise that leaders from the 'limited government' think tank, the American Legislative Exchange Council, offered to Utah when they ranked the state's economic outlook No. 1 for the 18th year in a row last month. Cox pointed to that ranking — and the U.S. News & World report ranking Utah the No. 1 best state in the nation for a third straight year earlier this week — as evidence that Utah is the 'best managed state.'
'(ALEC) said if we had just stopped 18 years ago, where we were when we were first No. 1, we would now be 22nd or 23rd,' the governor said. 'So we've been able to maintain that by constantly reinventing ourselves, looking for ways to do things better.'
Through Utah's existing fiscal conservatism, 'we've already done all the low-hanging fruit.'
'That's the difference between this and DOGE,' he said, saying the federal government has 'so much low-hanging fruit,' while Utah will have to reach higher. 'It's going to be harder for us, for sure, but we know it can be done.'
Pressed on whether GRIT could mean cuts to services — including social services — Cox said that's not the aim.
'It's not (about) reducing services. It's improving services,' he said, adding that he'd like to see any savings found to be recommitted toward making programs better, like perhaps moving people up on social services' wait lists.
'That's ultimately what we're trying to do, is not to just cut back what's already working and helping people,' Cox said, 'it's so we can help people more and fill some of those gaps that are already out there and broken.'
Cox called GRIT 'a comprehensive effort to make Utah's government more efficient, more accountable, and more responsible to the people that it serves.'
The governor said GRIT will have a 'bottom-up' approach, involving state government employees to ask 'tough questions about what is actually working, what's wasting time and money, and what needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.'
'If something isn't delivering value to the citizens of this state, we should stop doing it, and do something else with those limited resources that we have,' he said.
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With GRIT, 'we are really going to empower even more our cabinet members and our employees — every one of our employees.'
'We're expecting them to bring real solutions,' he said. 'And we'll be holding them accountable to doing exactly that.'
Additionally, Cox said state leaders will welcome feedback from Utahns about what is and isn't working for them.
Under Cox's executive order, all state agencies will be required to:
Submit at least one efficiency improvement project to the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget no later than July 1.
Direct each division, office or bureau to independently launch at least one additional internal efficiency project.
Participate in the state's Efficiency and Process Improvement Collaborative, an advisory committee made up of representatives from state agencies that is tasked with fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Use public feedback gathered from the state's Customer Experience Initiative, a program the Legislature created in 2020 that collects feedback from Utahns' experiences with state employees and issues annual reports for improvement.
Report 'measurable results related to cost savings, time savings, and improved service delivery,' according to the governor's office.
The governor's office encouraged Utahns to participate in the initiative by using QR codes that will be posted on receipts and in government buildings across the state, wherever Utahns engage with state services. They can also submit feedback online.
For transparency, Cox also said the state will be 'standing up dashboards' to show the initiative's progress, 'how much money we've been able to save, and how much time we've been able to shave off.'
Cox said state leaders have 'purposefully' not set a firm dollar amount of how much taxpayer money they'd like to save through the GRIT process because he said he wants to let agencies go through the exercise first.
'We will eventually get to a goal, but I want to hear the best ideas,' he said, though while looking around at his cabinet members he added 'we want this to be uncomfortable for the people standing behind me.'
'That's how you sharpen the saw.'
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