Kansas COGE seeks ideas ‘about ideas' on government efficiency. I have some thoughts.

Yahoo

23-02-2025

Lawmakers at the Kansas statehouse at Topeka have started their own government efficiency committee. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
Enthralled by the disruptive power of Trump's DOGE team as it stamps Godzilla-like on the federal government to make it smaller, the GOP-controlled Kansas Senate has created its own version.
The Sunflower edition, called COGE — Committee on Governmental Efficiency — doesn't have a mad tech oligarch as its head or platoons of teenage ninja hackers with monikers like 'Big Balls' to inspect your state tax return. But what COGE lacks in testicular fortitude it makes up for in rhyming with DOGE, and that's really the point.
Kansas is one of several red states to launch their own interpretations of DOGE, all conceived in the belief that waste is rampant and dedicated to the proposition that social programs must be trimmed.
Kansas COGE has a web portal to field suggestions on where the committee should look to find government waste.
'The purpose of this portal is to receive ideas from the public about ideas to make Kansas government more efficient and effective,' the webpage says, oblivious that the first place it should cut is the redundancy of 'ideas' in the sentence. 'Please submit ideas where you believe government could be improved to better serve the public.'
OK then!
'The committee will review those ideas as it deliberates and considers legislation.' See above regarding 'ideas.'
Let's go!
But wait, there is some information required first.
Below the introductory 'ideas' paragraph there's a form that requires your name, age range, and address (including city, zip and county). Your age and email are optional. There's a text box that will accept 3,500 characters, or about 575 words. That's just more than a single-spaced page of text. There's also a warning not to include personally identifiable information, such as your Social Security number (never mind about your name and address) and a caution that submissions are public documents subject to the Kansas Open Records Act.
OK, I'm ready to play!
Kansas could save millions by stopping fishing expeditions for voter fraud, which is nearly nonexistent. In 2021, Kansas paid $1.9 million in fees and expenses to settle a five-year battle over then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach's unconstitutional requirements for voting, based on his unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.
Efforts to restrict voting impact voters of color the most, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. Voter fraud is also extremely rare, according to the League of Women Voters, with the odds of being struck by lightning being greater than the occurrence of fraud.
Kobach, who is now Kansas attorney general, joined with eight other state attorneys general in suing the Biden administration in 2024 to stop voter registration efforts.
Stop the rush to privatize government. One example of a multimillion dollar headache was the privatization of child welfare in Kansas, a move initiated by Gov. Bill Graves and embraced in 2013 by Gov. Sam Brownback. The contractors collect payments and provide other services on behalf of the Kansas Department for Children and Families.
'The privatized system in Kansas for handling child support payments to 140,000 children suffers from Byzantine complexity perplexing to employees and the public,' the Reflector's Tim Carpenter reported in 2020, 'a laissez-faire approach to the enforcement of support orders, and a computer network that should be a candidate for the scrap heap.'
More than $800 million in child support had gone unpaid.
As of September 2024, DCF had made some improvements but still lagged on performance goals outlined in an agreement to settle a 2018 lawsuit over child services, according to a progress report. The department divides the state into six regions handled by private case managers. Despite the disheartening report, Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, told the Topeka Capital-Journal she was not ready to give up on privatization.
In 2023, lobbyists spent $807,806 on lawmakers, mostly for food and drink, according to the latest annual report by the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission. While legislators routinely defend the practice of accepting food and gifts from lobbyists by saying they can't be bought for the price of a meal, the reality is that lobbyists have far more influence than the average Kansan.
Consider the lobbying blitz that resulted in the legalization of sports betting.
A 2022 New York Times investigation described how lawmakers were treated to cigars, booze, and a private party in the runup to passage of the gambling law, which some lawmakers described as 'terrible' for Kansas.
Beginning last year, the names of lobbyists or other requesters are now required on Kansas House bills, in addition to its number and the official sponsor. While this transparency is welcome, lobbyists still have a remarkable degree of access — and influence over — lawmakers. That influence can result in terrible legislation, like the sports betting law, that cuts sweetheart deals for already rich proponents.
These are just three examples, but I'm sure readers can come up with many more. But instead of focusing on these kinds of issues, which either involve the disenfranchisement of swaths of Kansas voters or catering to powerful business interests, the Kansas COGE has instead concentrated on small potatoes issues that conform to red state ideas of government waste.
Take for example Senate Bill 85, which would direct DCF to search for families attempting to exploit the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP. The federal government covers 100% of SNAP benefits, while administrative costs are shared by the state. About 200,000 Kansans receive the benefits.
The measure, which came out of COGE, would require $11 million to implement and require the hiring of 110 additional state employees, according to a fiscal note attached to the bill.
'I have huge concerns with this bill,' said Sen. Cindy Holscher, an Overland Park Democrat, as quoted by the Reflector. 'We'd be reverifying information that has already been verified. We are supposed to be working in the name of government efficiency, and this makes government bigger and adds more red tape.'
It all comes down to one's definition of 'efficiency.'
For COGE, as with the rest of the GOP-controlled Legislature, efficiency appears to be anything that promotes business or advances the MAGA agenda, or ideally both. What is in the best interests of the poorest of Kansans doesn't enter into it, because COGE and DOGE and MAGA don't serve them.
With the bill that would add millions in state costs to police food stamps, there's also the Reagan-era stereotype of the welfare queen. While no assistance program is free from the potential for abuse, Ronald Reagan used the conservative trope of urban poor people of color as freeloaders and con artists as part of his 1976 presidential campaign. The message was that government, and government programs, were the problem.
DOGE expands on this by declaring government not just the problem, but the enemy. It assumes government is a business, rife with waste, run by lazy workers, and that only the world's richest man can clean things up. But government isn't a business. Those who think so deeply misunderstand democracy. While tools of business can benefit government, the purpose of government is to provide for the safety and welfare of all people, not just the rich.
Unlike the shadowy DOGE initiative, in which billionaire and uber Trump donor Elon Musk is/is not an employee or leader of the quasi-governmental group, Kansas COGE is an actual committee with identifiable members. It's a creation of the legislative branch, not the executive. The chair is Wichita Republican Sen. Renee Erickson, who back in 2021 presided over a two-day Legislative hearing featuring COVID-19 conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine rhetoric. Remember when misinformation about the pandemic seemed our greatest threat? That was just practice.
DOGE and its state copycats are now after their real goal, which is to shrink government and cut services in the name of 'efficiency.' Somehow, their kind of efficiency always ends up promoting the interests of the rich at the expense of just about everyone else. Just consider what gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development did to Kansas farmers — and the starving people in Africa and elsewhere who depended on the food aid. These programs aren't charities; they are a primary means of spreading American goodwill and democratic influence around the globe.
As DOGE operatives have been installed in some of the most important of federal agencies — the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Defense, the Social Security Administration, to name just three — there has been a marked lack of transparency in what was done and why. In preparation for the DOGE assault, Trump fired 18 inspectors general, the top agency watchdogs. Since then, thousands of federal workers have been laid off, according to the Associated Press, some in critical roles at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
It's difficult to tell from the outside what's really going on at these agencies, especially since the layoffs have been chaotic and the information about what access DOGE operatives have to sensitive information on government servers has conflicted. What do Big Balls and his colleagues really have access to at the U.S. Cybersecurity Agency?
But there's another malodorous smell wafting from DOGE, apart from the reckless layoffs and video game flop sweat. It's the sniff of a one-party system installing itself in the machinery of the federal government, in the same way political officers were installed on Soviet-era submarines to ensure loyalty and strict adherence to political ideology.
Remember 'The Hunt for Red October'? Tom Clancy, who spent years researching, accurately described the system in the 1984 novel. The story was based on a real event, and if you've seen the 1990 movie, the bit of dialogue you're most likely to recall is the disillusioned political officer, played by Sam Neill, imagining what his life in America would be like.
But I doubt anybody in DOGE is dreaming of living in Montana, marrying a round American woman, and driving from state to state with no papers, as did the fictional Capt. Borodin.
The oppressors seldom do.
And yes, they are oppressors; anybody who is responsible for gutting the jobs of thousands of hardworking federal employees is as much an oppressor as Musk or Trump.
The latest news on the DOGE front is that Trump is considering sending Americans $5,000 payments from the 'savings' found. It would be a cheap and desperate attempt to stem the tide of public disapproval, but it might work. Enough Americans were gullible enough to elect Trump. Why wouldn't they trade what remained of democracy for a few bucks?
In the end, DOGE and COGE and all the other -OGES in the rest of the states aren't about efficiency but ideology. The introduction to the Kansas COGE portal may have had it right in the first place.
It's all about ideas about ideas, not the real thing.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.