Mississippi officials have calculated there are hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of government waste.
According to Fox News, state auditor Shad White is set to release a compilation of findings from his office that shows a collective $400 million in wasted funds.
White told Fox News Digital that his office has started to call themselves “MOGE,” the Mississippi Office of Government Efficiency, similar to DOGE which is overseen by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as part of the Trump administration.
“We approach our work with the same attention to every penny as DOGE, and I’m happy to be Mississippi’s Musk,” White said in an exclusive interview with Fox News. “We’ve been working on this project really for the last couple of years.”
Fox News reported that state auditor’s report their findings to state lawmakers but are unable to cut wasteful spending themselves.
“What’s encouraging right now is that President Trump and Elon Musk are doing DOGE, which has raised public awareness about the amount of fraud, waste and abuse in government,” White said. “So, people are starting to look closely at what we’ve uncovered. In our time in the state auditor’s office, my team and I have uncovered about $400 million worth of waste.”
A report of Mississippi’s spending is due to be released in an 800-page report on Monday. White noted that Medicaid was a major issue, which included millions of state funds going to subsidies for those not eligible to receive them.
White noted that one state agency had spent $6,000 each on televisions.
“So, if you think the federal government is inefficient, I promise you, your state governments around the country are likely even less efficient,” he said.
White was also asked about wasteful spending around DEI and other initiatives, to which he stated even in Mississippi, which is a red state, there is still spending that needs to be trimmed down, noting that approximately $11 million in taxpayer funding has gone to DEI colleges.
“[W]hen you dig into what they’re doing with all of this staff time and all of these resources, they were doing things like holding microaggression training sessions for engineers — I don’t know why we need to do that. They were handing out grants for social justice yoga for preschoolers. Just crazy stuff,” White said.
White further added that 20% of people in Mississippi are below the poverty line so efficient spending of state and federal funds is a must.
Furthermore, millions of dollars have come from welfare appropriations that never got to the people who needed them, including community gardens that were never built and funding to help the poor that instead went to executive salaries.
“We found dollars supposed to be going to poor folks going to pay for sponsorship of beauty pageants,” White said.
“Really, I think the big-picture point here is, this kind of waste happens at every level of government,” White added. “And now that DOJ is taking the lead and showing the country how much fraud, waste and abuse there is, it’s really incumbent on every single state government to take a look at their own house and make sure that that fraud, waste, and abuse isn’t happening in state government, too.”
Written by Andrew Powell and published by Independent Journal Review ~ April 14, 2025
