White House staff secretary Will Scharf, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, joined by his son X Musk, center, and President Donald Trump appear for an executive order signing in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
North Carolina lawmakers have seldom been on the cutting edge of national public policymaking in recent decades.
Former Gov. Jim Hunt won plaudits and copycats at various points during his four terms in office for his ambitious and innovative efforts to boost early childhood and K-12 education. And, on the flipside, reverberations from House Bill 2 — the Republican legislature’s infamous anti-trans “bathroom bill” from the last decade — continue to be felt in numerous states.
But as those who trod the halls of the state Legislative Building on a regular basis can confirm, one of the first questions that’s typically asked whenever some newfangled idea emerges in debate is, “what’s been the record of this in other conservative states?” The right-wing corporate mouthpiece, ALEC, is often the source for many of the bills that end up working their way through the GOP-dominated legislature, but even these proposals have typically been tried elsewhere in places like Texas or Louisiana before making their way to North Carolina.
The state’s extremely tardy enactment of Medicaid expansion — in which legislative leaders permitted thousands of premature deaths over nearly a decade before finally giving in and making federally funded health insurance available to 600,000-plus lower income people — is a classic example of this late-to-the-party approach.
Interestingly, however, as recent events in Washington have served to emphasize, there is one important and overarching realm in which North Carolina policymakers have quite arguably made our state a kind of national policy petri dish in recent years: slashing the public workforce.
While North Carolina’s process has been much more gradual and has lacked the presence of a lightning rod like plutocrat-turned-pink-slip-czar Elon Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” there are important ways in which the treatment our state’s public employees endured in recent years was, effectively, a kind of DOGE 1.0.
Rather than empowering some autocratic bully to dispatch public employees left and right, legislators brought about very similar results in numerous agencies via the old-fashioned method of simply turning off the funding spigot. As I noted in this space earlier this month, North Carolina investments in state and local government plummeted by more than 30% during the last decade.
The most visible and destructive example of this pattern at work, of course, is to be found in our public education system. Rather than sacking educators directly, lawmakers opted for the subtler approach of driving teachers and would-be teachers away with lousy pay, increasingly expensive benefits, inadequate support, and a relentless series of micromanaging mandates. The result: a kind of grim, Muskian environment in which chronic teacher vacancies, overworked staff, and crumbling facilities have plagued K-12 schools across the state for years.
Similar results have been engendered in several other areas of core public service — from adult and juvenile corrections to environmental protection. Instead of subjecting people to an absurd and offensive directive demanding that they immediately explain and justify their positions, state employees have been left merely to contemplate their pay stubs and workloads alongside the large and growing gap between what they bring home and what they could earn and do in the private sector with similar credentials.
Of course, the problem for President Trump and Musk with employing North Carolina’s DOGE 1.0 approach in their crusade to eviscerate the federal government is that it will take time (and big majorities in Congress) they likely don’t have at their disposal.
Both men’s popularity in national polls has already dipped considerably since the onslaught commenced, and that’s before the impact of things like shuttered national parks and cutbacks in kids’ classrooms — much less the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the prices of consumer goods — soon begin to raise the public’s ire even further.
And so it is that the president and his billionaire sidekick have opted to plunge ahead quickly with a blitzkrieg of arguably unlawful edicts in hopes of causing enough chaos and destruction that at least some of their plan will take hold and have its desired effect — even if several of their executive orders end up running afoul of federal court rulings.
And while a planned hearing of a new DOGE wannabe committee in Raleigh indicates that support for the federal purge remains popular with some on the political right for the time being, how far Trump and Musk ultimately get with their scheme in the long run remains much in doubt.
The depth of the concerns to which the federal cuts have quickly given rise was evident last week when newly elected U.S. Rep. Pat Harrigan of North Carolina’s reliably Republican 10th congressional district tried to hold an in-district open house and quickly found himself retreating from the podium amidst a hail of pointed questions and angry complaints about DOGE.
And if the energetic resistance that has quickly arisen — even in places like Hickory, North Carolina — is any indication, a sustained bloodletting on a national level of the kind North Carolina legislators managed to inflict over the last several years with their state-level DOGE dress rehearsal may just be a bridge too far.