While the federal Department of Government Efficiency has come under fire in the past month for sweeping layoffs and cuts to government services, New Hampshire’s version of the effort has sought to assure the public that it is looking at things with a more fine-toothed comb.

“It’s not really about, you know, taking a meat cleaver to things,” said Drew Cline, the head of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, who sits on the state’s new Commission on Government Efficiency. “It’s about finding efficiencies.”

At the COGE’s first public meeting on Wednesday, former governor Craig Benson, who co-chairs the group, said commission members will weigh more than just spending cuts.

“We’re trying to do what we can to make services better,” Benson said. “It’s not all about cost-cutting. It’s about trying to make us more efficient, effective, serving the citizens — and the employees, for that matter — of the state.”

Rep. Laura Telerski, a Democrat from Nashua, attended the meeting. Later that afternoon, she highlighted concerns about the commission’s transparency. Members of the public could attend the meeting, but there was no option to live-stream it.

She also urged strict oversight on the COGE, citing the “unrestrained latitude” given to Elon Musk and the federal DOGE.

“While it remains unclear what COGE will be working on, we will be watching closely to ensure they don’t head down the same chaotic path as DOGE,” Telerski said.

The 15-person team was created by Gov. Kelly Ayotte on her first day in office. She said Wednesday that she couldn’t make much of a comparison between the state and national initiatives, pledging that her commission would follow state laws and rules.

“The thing that I think the COGE and DOGE do share is that, of course, we want to make government better,” Ayotte said.

One commission member did signal that he’s looking to Trump as a model, at least in some ways. Al Letizio Jr., who runs a sales and marketing company in Windham, said he wants to find new funding sources, which Trump calls the “external revenue service.”

“Where can we find efficiency from a budgetary standpoint without burdening taxpayers?” Letizio said. “Outside the state, there are lots of opportunities of revenue [to come] into the state that can help and be win-win for everyone.”

He did not specify what those opportunities are.

That quickly became a theme among members of the COGE: During the 24-minute meeting, the appointees were largely nondescript about their efforts so far. Members were announced in late January, and they said they’re still getting rolling.

To start, they’ve met with department heads from major state agencies to talk about where the government may be able to streamline processes and services and where they could trim their budgets. Each member, for the large part, said they’ve already had their initial meetings with their assigned departments and commissioners. Most, however, simply noted that they’d had productive conversations with department commissioners and didn’t delve into specifics.

House Speaker Sherman Packard, who nominated himself as the representative to serve on the commission, said he held a two-hour meeting with the Department of Safety earlier this week. He’s optimistic that there are some quick fixes to be made, though he didn’t dive into what those are.

“Right off the top, we can probably pull in a couple mill,” Packard said, “but it’s the long-term thing that I think that we’re all looking at to make government more efficient.”

Coordination between state agencies, too, looks to be a “real problem,” he added. An example, albeit a minor one, Packard said, is that around eight to 10 different agencies use firearms on the job. He suggested having all the agencies buy the same ones so they can be interchangeable.

Benson and John Morasco, a COGE member who’s also the director of the New Hampshire Division of Motor Vehicles, said they heard similar sentiments: that department heads want to interact and work with each other more. Greater communication, Morasco said, can lead to quicker decisions and actions.

Christopher Clement, a former commissioner of the Department of Transportation who now does government relations for an engineering company, said at one point he and the other department heads would get together once a month to exchange ideas. He suggested bringing that ritual back.

With his assigned departments, he’s also exploring upfront investments that might save money down the line.

“If there was maybe a one-time investment in capital that could, over time, bring down the costs of the operation, we need to look at that as well,” Clement said. “It’s not just cuts.”

Benson encouraged people to keep soliciting ideas from government employees, perhaps going down a step or two from the commissioners. He said he wants to hear what people on lower rungs of government have to say and that the group’s scope – as far as ideas go – is unlimited.

“Good ideas, crazy ideas, we don’t care,” Benson said. “We just want to get stuff on the table.”

Andy Crews, a New Hampshire Lottery commissioner and the COGE’s co-chair alongside Benson, said the commission works purely in an advisory capacity. The commission has no authority over state departments or spending, and nothing would happen without approval from the governor. They haven’t set a certain deadline to send proposals to Ayotte; the proposals will come as they come, he said.

Ayotte said on Wednesday that, once she receives recommendations, they’ll be posted publicly on the commission’s website, which is contained within the governor’s website.

“Any ideas that COGE comes up [with] will come to me. They’ll be public,” Ayotte said. “I’ll make a decision on them and people will know why I decided to adopt a recommendation or didn’t, so there will be a process in place, and we’ll be following New Hampshire laws.”

 

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.