ATLANTA—Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones (R-GA) sat down for an exclusive interview with Dome Politics and discussed Georgia's efforts to cut waste and spending in the state government. Donned the Red Tape Rollback Act of 2025, Lt. Gov. Jones' bill follows in the footsteps of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative at the federal level.
Lt. Gov. Jones reintroduced the Red Tape Rollback Act of 2025 in January at the beginning of the legislative session.
Dome Politics publisher Javier Manjarres asked Lt. Gov. Jones about the initiative after speaking on the issue of DEI.
"You know, it's kind of funny, because when you were talking about DEI, now you're talking about DOGE, these are all things that I implemented here in the State of Georgia two years ago when I took office," began Jones. "DEI was something that I wanted to get out of our university systems, and I was very vocal and proactive about that. In fact, you know, I took out of almost $100 million of the university's budget that went towards that."
The Peach State's second-in-command continued, sharing that his version is aimed at helping Georgia businesses cut through regulations that cost them time and money.
"And now with the — what I originally called the Red Tape Rollback — that now everybody is labeling is kind of the Georgia DOGE, but that's something we did last year," said Jones. "We passed it out the Senate, and we did not get it over on the House side, but we brought it back up because, like I said, as a business owner, the one thing that hinders businesses is time and money. And when you put more regulations, regulatory burdens in front of a business, it costs them just that: time and money."
Moreover, Jones shared that this DOGE-like program needs to be in effect every four years in order to work.
"So, our whole posture is we need to look at how we're doing business. We need to eliminate things that are duplicate services and that are really not meaningful to day-to-day operations. And we need to be evaluating that every four years. And that's essentially what we're doing with the red tape rollback/DOGE," said Jones.
