The Senate Committee on Regulatory Reform has moved forward with a bill that would create a “DOGE”-style efficiency department at the state level in North Carolina.
State Auditor Dave Boliek stood before the committee to express his support for the bill, which would establish the Division of Accountability, Value, and Efficiency (DAVE) within his office. Boliek said that the state auditor already has the authority to perform functions of the DAVE Act, such as financial, economic efficiency, or program/result audits, but the legislative effort will get real results.
“What this bill, however, does, is it puts the legislature together with the executive branch and the state auditor’s office to get real results,” said Boliek. “I didn’t run for this job because I wanted a job, I ran to do what is in the best interest of North Carolina. If you read the preamble of the North Carolina Constitution, it specifically uses the word “our Constitution is created for ‘better government.’ That’s what this bill is designed to do – better government. A data-centered approach that gets real, impactful results.”
Sen. Steve Jarvis, R-Davidson, and Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, presented Senate Bill 474 to the committee, describing it as a way to ensure the state government is operating efficiently.
“It is a bill that will facilitate the auditor’s ability to move forward with examining how monies that are appropriated by the General Assembly on a periodic basis, primarily through the budget, are actually being deployed to determine whether or not those deployed resources are effectively deployed, whether or not there’s a failure on the part of an executive agency to utilize the funds as directed by the legislature, and whether or not there is a return in many respects on the monies that are advancing in form of policy actually being advanced as directed by the General Assembly.”
Berger said the bill will need to be incorporated into the budget because it calls for the creation of additional slots at the auditor’s office.
An amendment was added to give the auditor more flexibility, the ability to request annual reports from the entities audited, and a sunset provision. Sen. Tim Moffitt, R-Henderson, said the 2028 sunset provision allows them to gather empirical data to assess moving forward.
Democrats expressed concern over the bill’s consequence on the state and condemned the provision allowing artificial intelligence to be used for the purpose of examining state agencies and their budgets.
“I think we are on the same page, the problem is, if you don’t have transparency over the AI in terms of what inputs it’s putting in, if I get an output from AI that says inefficiencies in X,Y,X, if I don’t know what inputs were put in, I would just take that answer as face value,” said Caleb Theodros, D-Mecklenburg. “So I think we agree in terms of the use of the output; however, for us to have more transparency, we need to know what’s the input of the AI itself.”
Sen. Sophia Chitlik, D-Durham, criticized the bill for emulating DOGE and said they are here to “create middle-class jobs, not destroy them.” She said of the 82,000 federal government workers in North Carolina, 35,000 positions are at risk due to the efficiency efforts under President Trump.