Op-Ed: Auditor Shad White: Mississippi’s roadmap for DOGE

Government is the only place where you could hand out health care services to rich people and for dead people and act like it’s just a normal business day. DOGE can fix this nationally.

President Donald Trump’s historic victory came just in time. After four years of watching the Biden administration throw trillions of taxpayer dollars down the drain, the American people are hungry for some common-sense reforms. These changes are coming in the form of an idea from President Trump that I’m very excited about: the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Musk and Ramaswamy are the perfect duo to lead this effort. Plenty of people will throw ideas at them for how to cut fat from the federal government, and here’s my humble addition to that suggestion box: look at states that have done cost-cutting projects.

My team here at the Mississippi Office of the State Auditor recently released our own DOGE (albeit much smaller): Project Momentum.

Project Momentum is the largest audit of government waste that Mississippi has seen in decades. We looked at everything from the cost of technology, travel, unused office space, the state plane, and everything in between.

Once it was all said and done, we identified over $335 million in reoccurring waste.

A lot of our findings are the exact things DOGE has been talking about recently, like unused office space.

The @DOGE account on X recently posted about how federal government agencies are using, on average, just 12 percent of the space they have in D.C. offices. Similarly, we found that here in Mississippi, we have some government agencies with over 800 square feet of office space per employee. In other words, a small apartment for every single employee.

Another issue that my office looked into, which President Trump and DOGE often discuss, is the cost of illegal immigration. My office conducted a report that looked into education, health care, and incarceration costs of illegal immigration that Mississippi taxpayers bear. Using the most conservative estimates possible, we discovered Mississippi taxpayers pay over $100 million every year on services for illegal immigrants.

Frankly, forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for all of these illegals who have flooded the country is unacceptable and is a key reason why Americans everywhere need to support President Trump’s mass deportation operation. We can’t continue to force taxpayers to bear the cost of Biden’s open border.

We also uncovered millions of dollars’ worth of misspending in Mississippi’s Medicaid program. After doing some analysis, my team discovered that anywhere between 5-7 percent of folks on the Medicaid rolls appear to earn too much money to qualify for the program. In a given year, that 5-7 percent ends up being around $60-140 million.

If that wasn’t infuriating enough, we also found over 200 dead people were on the Medicaid rolls — and state government was still paying to insure them. Government is the only place where you could hand out health care services to rich people and for dead people and act like it’s just a normal business day.

One other issue I’m eager to see President Trump and DOGE tackle is taxpayer-funded DEI. My office found that Mississippi state taxpayers funded DEI in our public universities to the tune of $11 million over the past few years.

We found DEI staffers who were earning more money than the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi combined. We also found that over 70 percent of this money went to pay for administrator salaries — not the students. And what did they spend the remaining money on?

One of their key accomplishments was funding a grant to study equity-based, social justice yoga for preschoolers. This nonsense has to stop.

The list goes on and on. We found government agencies paying $5,800 each for TV screens. We found that our state government spends over $340,000 a year on cell phones for state employees — and the phones are never turned on. We found we could save over $1 million per year by selling the state plane.

I want this to be a word of encouragement for President Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and everyone else at DOGE.

Cutting all the waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal government will be difficult. But I have complete and total confidence in President Trump and DOGE to finally get money going to the things that actually matter. And luckily for them, my office has a few ideas that we’d be more than happy to let them steal.

Shad White is the 42 nd State Auditor of Mississippi