A Montgomery County office — which one county commissioner described as a far less controversial version of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — has helped the county find $14 million in savings within the past year and reduce the deficit by half.
Montgomery County’s Office of Innovation, Strategy, and Performance (OISP), announced in February 2025, spent the last year meeting with department heads to identify areas for cost cutting and streamlining services, such as eliminating almost a dozen vacant positions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, saving $1.5 million on a prescription benefits provider, and conserving half a million dollars by bringing some county legal services in house.
In 2026, the office could consider integrating artificial intelligence into county services, with the support of all three commissioners, aimed at cutting red tape for residents and county employees.
“It’s kind of like DOGE,” said Commissioner Vice Chair Neil Makhija, a Democrat, noting that the office has “outlived” DOGE’s period of high activity when Musk was in charge before he stepped away last spring.
“We didn’t just take the richest person in the county and tell them to cut, you know, benefits for poor people, which is what the federal DOGE was,” Makhija said.
Also unlike DOGE — which under Musk’s leadership was responsible for the haphazard slashing of thousands of federal workers’ jobs during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term — the office does not envision layoffs becoming part of its mission.
The office’s work comes on the heels of the county’s $632.7 million operating budget and a roughly $25.5 million deficit, resulting in a 4% property tax increase for residents.
Republicans have made looking for inefficiencies in government part of their brand. But Democratic leaders in Pennsylvania have also started taking on streamlining government. Gov. Josh Shapiro has touted how he’s cut processing time for licenses and accelerated the permitting process for building projects.
And in blue Montgomery County, a bipartisan group of leaders says that responsible government efficiency should be a pillar of good government, regardless of political party.
“What happened with DOGE at the federal level was hard to watch and certainly not the approach that we’re going to take in Montgomery County, but, any leader … has to go through this exercise of are we optimizing our resources? Are we leaving money on the table? Are there opportunities to improve the performance of our people?” said County Commissioner Chair Jamila Winder, a Democrat.
“Like all of those are just disciplines that are industry agnostic, and so I don’t think it’s a Republican or a Democrat thing,” Winder added.
Commissioner Tom DiBello, the only Republican on the board, agrees, saying that he has high expectations for the office and its ability to oversee the adequate spending of taxpayer dollars.
“I mean, that’s our job. It has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat. My feeling, it has to do with taxpayer money,” DiBello said. “We’re supposed to be stewards of taxpayer money.”
Is artificial intelligence the next step?
The OISP was launched in February 2025 after the office previously served as the county COVID-19 pandemic “Recovery Office,” ensuring approximately $161 million in funds from the American Rescue Plan Act were being used appropriately.
When Stephanie Tipton, deputy chief operating officer, was hired in Montgomery County in September 2024 after more than 16 years in leadership in Philadelphia, county officials started discussing how to translate that oversight practice at the “Recovery Office” to every facet of county spending and performance.
That mentality helped the OISP cut the county deficit in half and focus on ways to reduce it in the long term, such as eliminating longstanding vacant positions around the county, including on the board of assessment, which does real estate evaluations. The office also helped develop performance management standards for departments.
“What we were really interested in is finding things that we could make repeatable year after year, and that would move forward, whether that was restructuring positions and eliminating vacancies that we don’t carry forward” to doing a trend analysis on spending, said Eli Gilman, project director of the 11-person office. He noted that the team was “kind of building a plane while we were flying.”
County governments are always trying to be efficient with taxpayer dollars, said Kyle Kopko, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, especially in the aftermath of last year’s state budget impasse. But Montgomery County’s decision to have a dedicated office for efficiency is fairly unique, he said.
“This is something that has become more and more of a focus of counties everywhere just because we’re not sure if we’re going to have the consistency of on-time state funds,” Kopko said.
The next phase for the office? Cutting red tape for residents. And part of that may be through enlisting artificial intelligence, something the county has been examining through the commissioners’ “Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence for Public Good” established in April 2025.
“The goal here is like, how can we leverage this new and emerging technology to help us make it easier for residents to access services,” Tipton said. “Make it easier, reduce the burden on our frontline staff, so they can spend more time in sort of customer-facing, client-facing activities.”
AI will be something that many counties across Pennsylvania will be grappling with moving forward, Kopko said. Though some counties are wary of using it for sensitive information.
Everyone has a different idea as to what they would want to see AI used for in Montgomery County.
Makhija wants to make court documents accessible by chatbot. Winder says she wants to see AI help county employees be more efficient in their roles. And DiBello, who worked in tech software, said as long as accuracy is prioritized, AI could one day be used in situations where residents don’t have to speak directly to someone.
But first, Tipton said, the county wants to internally test AI tools to “make sure that we have the right sort of governance and guardrails” before launching it to the public.
When Tipton joined Montgomery County she said she had a “clear mandate from the commissioners” to look at department spending. She also wants it to be a transparent process for residents and the office plans to launch an open data site to the public in the second half of 2026.
“We want to make sure that moving forward, when we are making investments in the budget we can really understand more clearly how that is impacting service delivery, so we can tie that more directly to work that we’re doing,” Tipton said.
