Reform’s Answer to Government Waste: Councillors as Britain’s DOGE

By Donna Rachel Edmunds, candidate for Hodnet Ward, Shropshire County Council.

When news broke that President Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, was shutting down The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the reaction was near universal condemnation from all the usual suspects.

Or to put it more bluntly, the Democrats lost their minds.

The shutdown was a “constitutional crisis!” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy exclaimed.  Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland slammed the move as an “illegal power grab,” insisting  it was “a corrupt abuse of power.” Highlighting government waste is a corrupt abuse of power? Not by my definition. 

Others in the press were keen to point out all the lovely things that USAID was doing for poor Africans and Indians. Without the American government handing out charity, food will go to waste, Uganda won’t have any Aids clinics, ISIS could take over in Syria again! Never mind that 

Yet it quickly emerged that the Democrats and their friends in the press weren’t really concerned about poor Africans missing out on handouts. Rather, the press themselves had been major beneficiaries of USAID. 

Politico seems to have received $8,000,000; Reuters received at least $9 million – although Musk admits that they’re still finding more money funneled to the international media outlet through various subsidiaries, so the final figure could be much higher. “Reuters was literally paid by the federal government for “Large Scale Social Deception,” Musk revealed. “That’s literally what it says on the official government documents!!”

But the corruption wasn’t limited to the States. Our very own BBC was in on the act. It received some $3million from USAID last year, paid to its international charity arm BBC Media Action. The charity works in 30 countries and 50 languages worldwide, encouraging journalists in some of the poorest parts of the world to lecture their readers on pet woke issues – everything from Covid vaccines to climate change and LGBT+ rights.

All of this is, of course, horrifying. It’s clear that US taxpayers have been scammed out of billions of dollars of their own hard earned money, all of it funnelled to vested interests, so called charities, and shady NGOs. 

But so have we. Charlotte Gill is an independent researcher who has spent the last year undertaking her own investigations into the British tax slurry pit. American taxpayers may have contributed $5million or so to the BBC, but the British taxpayer contributed even more: £57 million by Gill’s counting. 

And that’s not all. British taxpayers contributed a further £100 million to USAID itself! That included £2.4 million to increase Moldova’s competitiveness; £1.2 million to stop people trafficking in Nepal; £1 million to pay for education in Jordan; and £1.5 million for health reforms in Ukraine. As Gill said: “With Donald Trump shutting down USAID, at least it’s one less place for the Government to waste our money.” 

And waste our money, government does. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with government will know that if there’s one thing governments do really well, it’s waste public funds. Again, just take a quick look around Charlotte Gill’s site. In the last few weeks alone she’s found: 

• £318,510 on a taxpayer-funded study to find out whether water can carry “historical trauma”, as indigenous peoples apparently do. 
• £388,000 to the Institute for Public Policy Research, which researches  “strategies to defeat the far Right”.
• £3,457,082 to the Equality Diversity and Inclusion Caucus (EDICa) at Heriot-Watt University which, amongst other things, delves into “how race, gender identity, disability and neurodiversity may inform workplace experiences of people who menstruate.”

It goes on and on and on – the frivolous arts grants, the craze for Net Zero, the subsidies to favoured interest groups. The charity sector is awash with public money, so much so that if it stayed in taxpayers’ pockets in the first place, there would likely be little need for the charities we fund. 

The truth is, the British public are being robbed blind by our government. Last year’s Tax Freedom Day – that is, the day when Britons stop earning money for the taxman and start getting to keep the money they earn for themselves, fell on June 10th. That’s four days later than in 2023. Cost of Government Day, which includes taxpayer liabilities for government debt, fell over a month later on July 20th. 

The Adam Smith Institute, which compiles the stats, noted: “UK Taxpayers will fork out over £998.6bn to the Treasury this year [ie, 2024], 44.06% of net national income.” 

Imagine what you could do if your income doubled overnight. The upgrade to your car, the holidays you could go on, the gifts you could buy your children or your spouse. Heck, you could afford private health insurance, which would mean no more NHS queues. 

But as profligate as central government is, local government is just as bad. 

This year, local government has been granted a whopping £69 billion in funding by central government, which is 6.8% up from last year. And that’s before the up-to-10% rise in council tax intake that some councils will impose upon their hapless residents. 

A billion here, a billion there, and sooner or later it starts to add up to real money. Where does all that cash go? 

Some of it of course actually does get spent on care for vulnerable people, or schools, or picking up your bins. But some of it goes on free dental care for illegal migrants, or yet more Net Zero. According to one online commentator, UK councils have spent somewhere in the region of £4-6 billion on net zero and useless decarbonisation projects, with bankrupt Birmingham City Council alone dropping at least £136 million on green schemes. 

So far, however, there is no Elon Musk or Charlotte Gill asking local governments difficult questions on where all our cash is going. Consequently, we mostly just don’t know where all that cash is flowing to. But in May, that changes. 

On May 1st, 1,757 council seats (and two mayoral positions) are up for grabs. How many of those could Reform expect to win? 

Well, no one really knows, to be honest. 

Since the last General Election back in July, Reform have picked up 14 council seats in by elections. Labour have lost 42 – that is, of 116 Labour-held seats up for grabs, they successfully held on to just 74. The Conservatives have actually picked up seats in that time, going from 37 to 61. If that trend holds, Reform could expect to take at least 100 seats in May. 

But a peek under the bonnet suggests that Reform could do better in May than these figures suggest. 

The vote share across all by elections since July shows Reform taking an average 9.9% of the vote, yet current polling puts the party closer to 30%. Reform were somewhat blind-sided by the General Election, and for much of the latter half of 2024 had yet to get their ground game into shape. Assuming we can do that in the next few weeks, expect that average vote share to rise much higher in May. 

As the sun rises on May 2nd, the likelihood is that we won’t have 100, but hundreds of Reform councillors across the country. Each and every one of those councillors will be well placed to do as Charlotte Gill and Rupert Lowe are doing: to ask hard questions of their local authorities. 

Our new Reform councillors can and should act as Britain’s DOGE, uncovering potentially billions of pounds of local government waste – money which rightly belongs in the pockets of hard working Brits. Come May, I suggest we pick up that baton and run with it. 

Follow Donna on X here.