Elon Musk has left the Trump administration — and his role with the Department of Government Efficiency — to return to the private sector. Musk had originally said DOGE, as it’s commonly known, would save up to $2 trillion. He later revised that downward, cutting the cost saving goal in half. DOGE’s website estimates around $180 billion in savings, although many observers question that number, arguing it’s overblown.
The idea of making government run more efficiently — and inexpensively — is not a new one. Nor is it unique to the federal government. There’ve been a handful of efforts on the state level here in Arizona, as well; a particularly high-profile one came from Gov. Fife Symington in 1991.
It was called the State Long-Term Improved Management Plan, or Project SLIM. Doug Cole is now chief operating officer of the Phoenix-based consulting firm HighGround; he served as Symington’s Deputy Chief of Staff in the early 1990s. He says in the governor’s first budget approved by the legislature, Symington got about $2.5 million to start Project SLIM. And that, Cole points out, was with Democrats controlling the state Senate.
He says the effort was unique in part because it’d been about three decades since Arizona had had a governor who hadn’t previously served in elected office. Symington was a real estate developer.
Of the administration, Cole said, “They were part of government, they were part of building government, they believed in government. It’s not like Symington did not believe in government — but from a businessman’s standpoint, he felt that there could be a coordinated effort, where you would hire consulting teams from outside government, and then systematically go with these teams in various state agencies, analyze them, interview employees, interview management, and then come back with a plan to make that agency run better.
Cole also mentioned bringing in an outside consulting firm; that aspect of Project SLIM proved problematic for the Symington Administration. Allegations of insider dealing and bid rigging for the firm that the state ultimately hired continued to follow the administration through Symington’s time in office.
That scandal dominated headlines at the time, taking attention away from any of Project SLIM’s accomplishments.
Cole emphasized that the plan was to take a thoughtful approach to making state government run more smoothly and efficiently, and in a perfect world, not have residents notice because services would remain the same.
A little more than a decade after Project SLIM began, another governor — from a different party — tried something similar.
Lisa Glow worked in the Napolitano administration. She’s a nonprofit and government consultant and until recently served as the CEO of Central Arizona Shelter Services, or CASS.
“So, when Janet Napolitano became governor in 2003, in her State of the State, she knew she needed to address how she was gonna tackle an over $1 billion budget deficit. One of the things she talked about doing was creating a Governor’s Efficiency Review process to improve performance in state government, find savings, etc. So, she was hoping to generate savings but also improve efficiency in government and reduce costs permanently, and it became an ongoing part of the administration — the efficiency review process, the whole time she was in office.”
The executive order Napolitano signed in 2003 creating the Governor’s Efficiency Review focused on areas like use of the state vehicle fleet, requiring state workers to look for federal money to pay for programs, using email and faxes instead of printing and mailing and reducing energy costs, among others. Instead of having outside teams go into state agencies as they did during Project SLIM, Glow says Napolitano’s effort was more internal.
“So, the approach was all agencies were directed to come up with a plan within the parameters of these specific areas: travel, energy conservation, procurement — areas that you can always find ways to be more efficient. Using the in-state training contract, as opposed to expensive providers outside. So, they had to come up with their plans and then it was tracked and they had to report on what those savings were on an ongoing basis," said Glow.
Glow and former Symington staffer Doug Cole both say the efforts of each administration paid off.
Cole says Project SLIM changed the culture of government.
“It was extremely difficult in 1991, 1992 to get it off the ground because Arizona state government had never experienced something like this. And I think now, it’s engrained in every state agency in government," said Cole.
That’s carried through to subsequent governors, Cole says, including Napolitano’s program, and later, one implemented by Gov. Doug Ducey’s administration.
Longtime Arizona lobbyist and Republican political strategist Kevin DeMenna says one of the lessons is that it’s not that easy to cut state government, and that future efforts need to be innovative.
“The notion of bringing corporate cost-cutting strategies and tactics to government just didn’t happen for a while,” DeMenna says. “May I submit that since government and business are really not that much alike that it might have been for the better.”
DeMenna doesn’t believe using private-sector efficiency strategies in government is a good place to start, because of those differences.
Napolitano administration alum Lisa Glow says efficiency reviews are good, in government, nonprofits or the private sector. But she says the way they’re done matters — both for the results and for the people involved. Unlike Project SLIM or the Governor’s Efficiency Review, Glow continues, DOGE seems to be more of a top-down, not agency-driven approach.
“The way that it’s been carried out, I think, has had some negative downstream impacts that maybe wouldn’t have happened if some other guardrails had been put in place.”
Doug Cole adds, “Unlike what has happened here on the federal level since the second Trump administration has come in, the effort here was designed to be a thoughtful process ... To go in with teams with goals — not a dollar goal, but to look at how they can streamline the operations without affecting the services that need to be delivered at the inside. There was no target number that was identified to save, but recognizing the governor wanted to have a tax cut and when you had split government, you had to balance that.”
In the final analysis, Arizona government did shrink and become more efficient and streamlined, Cole says. It’s more complicated than that, however, he adds.
“You can’t score directly in these efforts that this was a result of Project SLIM or any other subsequent efforts by other governors because you have recessions, you have federal government programs that are put on to state governments. So, government expands and contracts because of the economy, one, and two because of what the federal government does.”
Those federal government actions are now impacting another Arizona governor, Katie Hobbs, as well as lawmakers, as they work to craft a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, and try to determine how much money they actually have to work with and whether they’ll need to come up with any cost-savings of their own.
Kevin DeMenna says other trends at the state capitol could pose a challenge to more efforts to make government more efficient.
“With the size of the budget, with the turnover in decision-makers and the lack of a transparent and open budget process, the idea of an institutional memory, the idea of having the type of resource that would allow you to go into these budgets and make effective reductions — that information gap may be too big,” DeMenna says.
We should have a better sense of what any potential budget reductions could look like — as lawmakers get closer to the June 30 deadline to approve a new state budget.
