Kemi Badenoch has backed a UK version of Elon Musk’s US government efficiency drive, DOGE, calling for a “revolution” in the public sector.
The Conservative leader revealed she is “looking very closely” at DOGE’s slash-and-burn cost-cutting model. Asked on the Daily T podcast if Britain needs a similar initiative, Badenoch responded: “I think so.”
She added: “If you remember in my campaign launch speech, I said that we need to reboot [and] rewire the state. This is what we have to do.
“And I’m looking very closely at what they are doing in DOGE.”
Tech billionaire Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been the cause of significant controversy in the United States as it has foraged the federal government for savings. Critics allege a lack of transparency and argue there are no discernible limits on Musk’s influence.
Musk, the world’s richest individual, has said he wants to cut at least two trillion US dollars, one third of the US federal government’s annual budget.
So far, DOGE employees have shown up at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among other agencies.
Reflecting on how a national government can best lead an efficiency drive, Badenoch considered two possible approaches, including one advocated by Argentinian president Javier Milei.
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She said: “You can try and make services more efficient, or you can just stop doing things, which is what they’ve done in Argentina, which is the ‘Afuera’ model, as I call it. I think that’s likely to be much more effective — where you have to think through and plan and work out, if we stop this, what’s going to happen?
“Quite often, what happens is people make an announcement, we’re going to stop this, and then there’s all sorts of knock on effects, and they panic, and then they put it back, and you realise they don’t know what they’re doing.
“The policy commission work which we’re going to be carrying out is going to do lots of deep thinking about all of this. We have to do something like DOGE — probably won’t call it that. We have to have a revolution on this, and we have to make sure that we get more people back into work, because that fixes a whole bunch of things.
“It fixes immigration, where there’s pressure to bring in lots of people to do jobs that Brits don’t necessarily want to do or cannot do because they don’t have the skills. But it also means that we’re making more money and can support better run public services.”
Badenoch also began the Conservative Party’s expectations management ahead of the upcoming local elections on 1 May.
She said: “If people are not voting Conservative because they want to give us a kicking or they want to try their luck with Reform, then we’re going to see more and more Labour.
“These are going to be extremely difficult local elections, not just because four years ago, we were at a high water mark, but because of the results in July 2024, if we had those results now, we will lose all but one council that we control. In fact, I think we might even lose that council if we repeated the July 2024 results.
“So we need to compare where we are now from where we were in July 2024 and remind people that when you vote for a local council, you’re voting for who you want to run your school, your children’s education, to take your bins, look out after your parks, fix your roads, and it’s not about giving Conservatives a kicking.”
The Conservative leader also ruled out ever signing a pact with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, saying the party’s manifesto promises “didn’t add up”.
Badenoch told the Daily T podcast: “I am the custodian of an institution that has existed for nigh on 200 years…I can’t just treat it like it’s a toy and have pacts and mergers.”
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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Source: Politics
