The first-ever meeting of the COGE — Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s new Commission on Government Efficiency — lasted barely half an hour Wednesday morning, prompting a few quips from public officials.
“I guess that’s what you call efficient,” mused John Corbett, Ayotte’s senior advisor, at the close of the session.
It’s a sign of how different Ayotte’s cost-cutters are taking the job compared to the Elon Musk-led DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) in Washington, D.C.
“Instead of ‘move fast and break things,’ New Hampshire is more ‘let’s sit down and think about this,’” one Republican Ayotte supporter said on background.
Ayotte’s COGE, a 16-member panel of state business, political, and policy leaders, is still in its infancy. According to Co-Chairman Craig Benson, who served one term as governor, the “whole idea is to get an introduction to these state department heads and staff members to understand what their challenges and opportunities are.”
That’s not to say Wednesday’s meeting at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics lacked pointed moments.
Taking a page out of Ayotte’s 2024 “Don’t MASS Up New Hampshire” campaign playbook, businessman and COGE member Al Letizio Jr. speculated bout what would happen if a similar commission took a deep dive into government efficiency under Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey.
“If we were over the border in Massachusetts, working with the Healey group, you couldn’t walk into a room without finding a billion dollars worth of savings,” said Letizio, the founder and CEO of a Windham-based wholesale food industry supplier.
Letizio was also unafraid to reference the Trump administration’s DOGE program.
“Boy, you know, if we were Elon Musk and we were down in the federal government following the Biden administration, boy, you could just walk into a room and there’d be opportunities all around you for efficiency,” Letizio said.
Benson made it clear the purpose of COGE is not to gut the Granite State’s government.
“It’s not all about cost cutting. It’s about trying to make us more efficient and effective, serving the citizens — and the employees, for that matter — of the state.”
According to Benson, initial meetings between state government department chiefs and the COGE members assigned to oversee those agencies have been positive.
“I will say that the smiles have been contagious from our side as well as theirs, which is a great way to start this,” he said.
COGE member Drew Cline, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, agreed.
“There’s been just very much an openness and willingness to share every bit of information, and I think they’re very excited to talk about the sort of good things they’re doing in their departments and to work with us,” Cline said. “Like someone else said, it’s not really about taking a meat cleaver to things. It’s about finding efficiencies.”
House Speaker Sherm Packard (R-Londonderry) said he met with Department of Safety Commissioner Robert L. Quinn and added he’s “already started working on different avenues that they’d like to go down, and right off the top, we could probably pull in a couple million [dollars].”
One example Packard cited is the fact that different state agencies use different firearms.
“I’m just using this as a minor example to make sure that they all buy the same firearms, so it’s all interchangeable,” he said.
Several members cited inter-agency relations as one area ripe for improvement.
“One opportunity that I’ve seen with most of the people I’ve spoken to is that they would like to interact with other department heads and staff members as well,” Benson said. “So I think we can afford an opportunity to be better about crossing different boundaries, to have even more opportunities.”
And while the reality of the COGE effort in New Hampshire is very different from the more controversial DOGE in Washington, D.C., that didn’t stop Granite State Democrats from trying to tie the two together.
“Granite Staters are rightly concerned about the lack of transparency from Gov. Ayotte’s commission given the fact that at the federal level, an unelected billionaire has been given unrestrained latitude to rig the federal government, gain access to our personal data, threaten federal funding, and stop critical funding to agencies,” Deputy House Minority Leader Laura Telerski (D-Nashua) said in a statement.
The House Democrats’ social media account on X, formerly known as Twitter, shared Telerski’s statement and complained that the first COGE meeting “was held with little notice to legislators and without an option for the public to livestream the meeting.”
Telerski added she is still “unclear” as to “what COGE will be working on.”
“We will be watching to make sure they don’t head down the same chaotic path as DOGE,” Telerski said.
Asked by a reporter Wednesday to compare the COGE and DOGE efforts, Ayotte said, “The thing that I think the COGE and DOGE do share is that, of course, we want to make government better.”
