DOGE In the States

One Place to Start

A lot of people are asking for DOGE in their state. It is not just the federal government that wastes money. All governments waste money. We pay too much in taxes.

Chuck Muth is a blogger in Nevada. He started The Pigpen Project to clean up the voter rolls in Nevada and ran into a lot of resistance from the Democrats. Predictable. In a recent blog post, he talked about getting rid of one agency in Nevada that is probably a cesspool of patronage. He also wrote about these government programs which interested me.

The Nevada Entrepreneur Network offers a streamlined application to help entrepreneurs start, scale, staff, and protect their businesses at no cost.

StartUpNV is a statewide business incubator that offers various programs to help entrepreneurs develop and scale their ideas.

Nevada Partners runs an Entrepreneurship Program designed to create new pathways to self-sufficiency and wealth-building for individuals.

Incubator Space, located in the Las Vegas/Henderson area, provides coworking and office space for startups, entrepreneurs, and freelancers.

Incubate Vegas offers free business development and startup services for first-time entrepreneurs and disadvantaged small businesses in Clark County.

The InNEVator Blockchain Accelerator, – run by UNR's Innevation Center – focuses on helping blockchain startups grow rapidly.

Many states and cities have invested taxpayer dollars into government efforts to empower entrepreneurs. Their hearts are in the right place, but it is a total waste of government/taxpayer resources and money.

Nevada could end all those efforts and save money. They exist only to create government jobs for people. They make politicians feel good. They allow the politicians to trumpet that they are behind innovation. Who isn’t behind innovation?

When I was in Chicago there were all kinds of similar efforts. They were a waste of money there too. It gave people titles. Chicago and Nevada were venture capital and entrepreneurship backwaters before those government efforts and they are still afterthoughts when it comes to both.

Boulder Colorado Venture Capitalist Brad Feld says great entrepreneurial ecosystems are entrepreneur-led. I think that is largely true, as long as there is a lot of early-stage risk-loving venture capital to fund them. As soon as you either rely on the government or get the government involved, the system crashes.

I might also add that very few colleges and universities are good at teaching entrepreneurship. Often, they resemble their government counterparts. I know of one “incubator” at a college where the upper-level staff had prior careers in government.

Continuing in that vein, when the government gets involved the restrictions come. They say a certain percentage of whatever has to go to some special interest group.

The incentives are different for the private sector than they are for the government sector. The accountability is different. For the private sector, it is about ringing the cash register. You ring it when you solve problems for customers. You also do it for the least amount of cost that it takes to get the job done. For government, it’s about expansion, increasing power, and placing people in jobs that they control. They ask for increased budgets even though nothing happens.

How many state-run or city-run government programs are wastes of taxpayer dollars and resources? I bet more than just a few.