Gov. Kim Reynolds’ Iowa DOGE Task Force is floating government efficiency ideas that include paying teachers based on their performance and reducing state employee benefits to align with the private sector.
The task force unveiled 45 recommendations at its meeting Wednesday, but the list is not final until its members vote to finalize the recommendations at a future meeting.
Task force member Terry Lutz said Iowa has increased spending on K-12 education over time, but the state’s national rankings in math, reading and science have slipped to the middle of the pack. He said the current education funding model isn’t working.
“Our current system rewards teachers and administrators for their length of service or the duties they take on, with no ties to student achievements,” Lutz said at a task force meeting Wednesday. “This system does not reward excellence in education. It’s important to note, we are not suggesting cutting costs. We are focused on spending that rewards what matters: higher student achievement.”
He said his working group on the task force recommends a “pay for performance” system that ties teacher and administrator compensation to student outcomes, along with dashboards that can be used to compare dollars spent with student achievement.
Lutz also said some state jobs have health care and retirement benefits that far exceed the private sector. He said his working group recommends eliminating the state’s public employee pension plan, known as IPERS, and replacing it with a defined contribution program.
“The current program is creating huge liabilities for our state,” Lutz said. “Currently, the state is contributing nearly 70% to an employee’s retirement plan, where the employee is contributing only 30%. In the private sector, these percentages would almost be the opposite of that.”
He said state employee contributions to their health insurance costs are “extremely low and way out of whack with the private sector.” Lutz said the state should study how to align state compensation and benefits more closely with the private sector, and that the state could consider applying these changes to health and retirement benefits only to new employees.
Iowa DOGE Task Force Chair Emily Schmitt was asked about these recommendations after the meeting.
“It was put on us as the task force to really look at the benchmarking out there — how do we run a state like a business, where we’re getting the results and looking at the outcomes,” she said. “Not just the programs, but also where is an outlier compared to what we’re seeing in business, and how do we keep up with that.”
While county consolidation was mentioned at the Iowa DOGE meeting in June, task force members said Wednesday they are recommending local governments share more services and have the state take on some county functions in an effort to cut costs and improve services.
Schmitt said the task force is facing a Sept. 29 deadline to deliver its final recommendations to the governor. From there, many of the recommendations could be considered by state lawmakers during the 2026 legislative session.
Task force member and Fareway CEO Reynolds Cramer, who led the workforce work group, said he believes the Iowa DOGE recommendations are for the state of Iowa.
“It does not matter who is in the governor’s seat, who controls what area at the Statehouse,” he said. “It matters about the dollars spent when it comes to workforce, keeping kids who graduate in Iowa to stay in Iowa — to get jobs, to move on for further education and live their life here — and all together, create a better economic situation.”
These are some of the recommendations discussed by the Iowa DOGE Task Force:
- Consolidate workforce training programs and streamline funding for them
- Establish a regular review of workforce programs to ensure funding goes to what works
- Create a “red tape hotline” for Iowans to report bureaucratic hurdles
- Establish business-led panels to evaluate workforce program outcomes
- Expand work-based learning programs
- Invest in infrastructure and instructors for workforce training programs
- Expand shared IT services across state agencies, and offer some to local governments
- Move more state systems to the cloud
- Reduce IT procurement rules that slow down processes
- Speed up the move from paper forms to digital forms
- Use robotic process automation and AI for repetitive tasks
- Establish common fraud detection systems for all state agencies
- Make digital state services and forms easier to use, perhaps by creating a single sign-on portal
- Create a statewide data management system and set clear rules for technologies like AI
- Link teacher pay to student outcomes
- Allow cities with populations over 50,000 to become independent from counties
- Provide grants and assistance to local governments that want to share services
- Have the state take over some local services
- Reduce state employee health care and retirement benefits to align with the private sector
- Establish clear criteria for disposing of or repurposing underused state facilities
- Speed up the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ permitting process for construction
- Encourage local governments to consider sharing water and wastewater projects
