Hours after being sworn into office Thursday, Gov. Kelly Ayotte issued her first Executive Order, creating a new 15-member Commission on Government Efficiency.
While details on the new initiative — including who will serve on it, its scope of duties and whether its work will be open to the public — remain scant, Ayotte did turn to two trusted allies to lead the new commission.
Ayotte tapped former Republican Gov. Craig Benson — who employed Ayotte as his legal counsel and later appointed her to be state attorney general — and Bedford businessman Andy Crews — a longtime political donor to Ayotte — to lead the group, which Ayotte called by the abbreviation “COGE.”
In her inaugural address, Ayotte said COGE would deliver ideas to streamline state government and cut spending.
“COGE will make us smarter than ever before when it comes to saving taxpayer dollars and finding better ways to serve the people of our state,” she said.
The executive order creating the commission gives Ayotte the authority to appoint 13 additional commission members; two additional members would be a state representative and a state senator, to be appointed by the House speaker and Senate president.
Ayotte’s office did not respond immediately to questions Friday about how the commission will operate, including whether its meetings would be open to the public, whether commissioners would receive compensation, what the final work product of COGE might be, or whether there is any timeline to produce it.
Depending on how fast the commission acts, its work could inform the coming debate over the state budget, which lawmakers will begin in the coming weeks. Ayotte will present her proposed budget to lawmakers next month. In her inaugural speech Thursday, Ayotte said the state needed to “make reductions and recalibrate from the higher spending of the last few years.”
While this commission owes its nickname, COGE, to the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) launched by President-elect Donald Trump and led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, state commissions aimed at making government more efficient have been a recurrent feature of New Hampshire government, stretching back to Republican Gov. Hugh Gregg in the 1950s.
Benson, who will lead this commission, spurred lawmakers to create an efficiency commission by statute in the early days of his own governorship in 2003.
That commission — which received financial support from Benson’s own political committee, as well as from various state and national businesses — issued a final report that identified $417 million in potential savings to be realized over five years.
Few recommendations of that report — which called for the privatization of the state’s prison system, the streamlining of state procurement practices, and would have forced state employees to pay more towards their health care costs — were ever put into place.
