There is “no reason” state-level DOGE reforms could not be implemented at the federal level, newly appointed Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily.
Husted talked about the program he founded, InnovateOhio, while serving as lieutenant governor of the Buckeye State. Host Matthew Boyle described the program as “kind of like the precursor of DOGE.”
“And you had on your board of this initiative, Vivek Ramaswamy, Bernie Moreno — your other senator who you serve with in Ohio, and JD Vance, now vice president of the United States on the advisory board,” he continued as Husted explained the idea behind it.
“We started it in 2019 the idea was, it was to use technology to improve the way we serve our customers, the taxpayers of the state of Ohio, and I wanted a group of innovative people to be on the board to help me think through these things,” he said.
“At the time, I picked three people from the private sector, JD Vance, Bernie Moreno, Vivek Ramaswamy — they were among the people on the board. And we started to think through these things. Who knew that this many years later, that all of them would be in such prominent roles that they are now,” he exclaimed, explaining that they asked themselves, “How do we use technology to improve customer service?”
“So we basically eliminated the need to go into a DMV in Ohio anymore. To renew your driver’s license, we put it all online. If you do need to go there, we allow you to get in line online, so that you don’t have to wait, which is a huge,” he said, walking through more reforms.
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Breitbart · Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) – February 1, 2025“We’ve saved 700,000 hours in the past year people previously waited, eliminated 8.7 million visits. So that’s what we’re talking about. How you make government work for people more efficiently, we use the AI tool to go through the entire regulatory code, and we’ve eliminated 2 million words out of the regulatory code,” he revealed.
“I have a plan in the next state budget to eliminate a total of 5 million, which I know that they will see through. We did a duplicate payment system where we track to make sure you don’t over double pay. In the past year, we saved $9 million of stopping double payments,” the senator continued.
“So we used InnovateOhio to take technology to improve customer service. The folks that you know that I talked about — JD, Vivek and Bernie — were all part of that, and now we have DOGE, which hopefully we can do this at the federal level,” he said, adding that there is “no reason” that everything they did at the state level cannot be done at the federal level using the “same tools.”
While he said there are many rules prohibiting one from using technology to improve customer service under federal programs, he plans to work on that as senator.
“I’m really looking forward to working with DOGE on these issues as they move forward,” he added.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
