Senior Reform UK councillors at Kent County Council have admitted their Elon Musk-inspired DOGE initiative has failed to find any significant wasteful spending.
Kent was one of 10 councils that Reform took control of in last year’s local elections, and Nigel Farage immediately boasted about how the party would abolish “wasteful” spending by the council.
A Department of Local Government Efficiency (Dolge) team was set up, inspired by Elon Musk’s ‘Doge’ initiative in Donald Trump’s government, and run by Zia Yusuf.
There were grand plans for the cost-cutting scheme and proud claims that Reform would be able to save millions by cutting wasteful spending.
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But now, senior party councillors in Kent their expectations of finding mountains of wasteful spending had failed to materialise.
Paul Chamberlain, one of the Reform cabinet members in charge of Dolge, told the Financial Times that after nine months in charge of England’s biggest authority they had failed to find any significant waste.
He told the publication: “We made some assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness that Doge found in America . . . and that was wrong, we didn’t find any of that.”
Chamberlain said members of the former Conservative administration “weren’t crazy, they were business people.”
The revelations seem to debunk previous claims from Farage and Yusuf that wasteful spending and “fraud” was rampant in local government.
Perhaps most significantly, Farage wants to replicate the scheme on a national government level should Reform get into power, on the same assumption that wasteful spending is everywhere.
In fact, Reform are actually proudly pointing out how they have blocked some previously proposed cuts in Kent.
Speaking to the FT, Matthew Fraser Moat, another KCC cabinet member for Dolge, said he was really proud that the Reform council had “not actually made any cuts.”
He pointed out that Reform “haven’t cut frontline services other than what the Conservatives had already planned to do” and had actually blocked some proposed cuts, such as the closure of libraries.
It’s not just UK DOGE that has failed miserably. In December, it was revealed that Musk’s initiative had failed to make any overall savings at a federal level, where there had actually been a 6% increase in costs.