Iowa floats first state-level ‘Department of Government Efficiency’
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds speaks at a previous event. Reynolds recently announced a state-level 'Department of Government Efficiency,' an homage to President Donald Trump's recent executive order. Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images
By
Chris Teale
Gov. Kim Reynolds said the new task force would build on the state’s previous efforts to consolidate agencies and technology, which has already saved millions of dollars.
President Donald Trump wasted little time in establishing the Department of Government Efficiency, albeit as a component of the existing U.S. Digital Service. One state leader intends to follow in his footsteps and appears to be the first to do so.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, announced during her Condition of the State address earlier this month that she would establish a state-level DOGE by executive order, a task force “to find even greater savings and efficiencies in both state and local government” as part of a plan to pass property tax reform. As of this week, an executive order had not been issued.
Reynolds said the efficiency initiative would build on efforts already undertaken in Iowa, which consolidated 37 state agencies into 16, including consolidating IT systems that once were in 20 departments into one. That effort began in 2023 and has saved taxpayers $217 million already, Reynolds said, but there is more to do.
“I like to say that we were doing DOGE before DOGE was a thing,” she said during her speech. The task force will be led by Emily Schmitt, the general counsel of grain equipment manufacturing company Sukup Manufacturing.
A similar effort is already in place under Iowa’s Auditor of State Rob Sand, who for the past six years has provided a Public Innovations & Efficiencies Checklist to help state and local governments “increase efficiency and communicate with the public about their efforts.” In a statement after Reynolds’ speech, Sands said he hoped the new DOGE would collaborate with his existing initiative “rather than inefficiently duplicating efforts.” Mississippi has a similar efficiency program in place.
Reynolds said the consolidated approach to technology helped Iowa last year during the CrowdStrike outage, which happened after the cybersecurity company issued a faulty update and caused widespread chaos across multiple sectors.
At a panel discussion during the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ annual conference in New Orleans last year, Iowa Deputy CIO Michelle O’Hollearn said the outage “completely turned the apple cart upside down” while state officials were in the midst of consolidating their technology offices.
Reynolds said in her speech that the consolidated approach helped the state limit the damage.
“[When] cybersecurity company Crowdstrike brought down IT systems across the world, Iowa’s consolidated system was back online shortly after lunch, while other states and businesses were in the dark for days and even weeks,” she said. Consolidation has provided a “single viewpoint into every IT operation within the executive branch,” Reynolds added.
Iowa’s DOGE will likely go far beyond technology, although the federal one might provide some clues on how state leaders could proceed. Trump’s executive order put the U.S. Digital Service — or U.S. DOGE Service, as it is now known — to work on a “Software Modernization Initiative,” that the order said will look “to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems.”
“Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization,” the executive order continued.
Iowa’s IT leadership now falls entirely on its Department of Management. O’Hollearn said last year at NASCIO that has meant “having a much larger organization” as IT staff are all centralized there, as well as “knowing what [we've] got, and then unifying and standardizing.” As the state’s efforts to think of IT at an enterprise level continue, they will continue to look for “low hanging fruit” and “big opportunities” to not just find efficiencies but also partner with vendors, O’Hollearn added.
Getting state legislators on board to support those efforts will be key, she said.
“Telling the story probably isn't where a lot of technicians are strong, and so I think this is definitely where partners can come help us to think about, how do we create that narrative together?” she said. “Come with ideas, understand strategically where we're going, and then we can work together to get there.”
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