By Zac Townsend | Guest Commentary
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known shorthand as DOGE, launched under President Trump in January and since has sent shockwaves through Washington and the rest of the country. As California’s former chief data officer, I’ve watched this experiment with a mix of alarm and reluctant admiration.
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DOGE’s methods — unilateral power grabs, reckless data access and a cavalier disregard for legal boundaries — are a masterclass in what not to do. Yet its core aim, slashing wasteful spending and forcing accountability on a bloated bureaucracy, is a goal no serious leader can ignore.
California, with its $322 billion budget and perennial fiscal crises, desperately needs a similar reckoning. Any candidate for governor in 2026 must embrace this challenge — not with Musk’s sledgehammer, but with a scalpel guided by data and transparency.
DOGE’s rollout has been a circus. Shutting down entire agencies like USAID overnight, seizing control of Treasury systems that hold sensitive taxpayer data, and wielding AI to slash budgets without congressional oversight isn’t reform, it’s chaos. Lawsuits piling up from unions and states underscore the legal quicksand Musk has stepped into.
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California cannot afford such recklessness. Our state’s challenges, such as wildfire recovery, housing shortages and Medi-Cal expansion, demand precision, not a billionaire’s blunt force trauma.
But let’s not kid ourselves: California’s government is rife with waste. As a state data official, I saw firsthand how departmental silos obscure spending, how outdated systems hide inefficiencies, and how fraud festers in a budget so vast it defies comprehension. The Legislative Analyst’s Office routinely flags billions in questionable allocations, yet we rarely see follow-through.
DOGE’s aim to save taxpayers money resonates here, where taxes soar and deficits loom. The idea of a top-to-bottom audit of every department isn’t radical — it’s overdue.
What California needs is a smarter playbook. We can look to Maryland, where then-Gov. Martin O’Malley implemented StateStat nearly two decades ago (now called the Performance Improvement Office), or Washington with Results Washington — both data-driven systems that tracked the performance of agencies in real time. From crime rates to infrastructure delays, these platforms create accountability, cut costs and delivered results, without burning the house down.
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Zac Townsend is the CEO of Meanwhile. He was previously the inaugural chief data officer of California under Gov. Jerry Brown and the chief technology officer of Newark, New Jersey, under then-Mayor Cory Booker.
