You remember COGE (Commission on Government Efficiency), don’t you? Kelly Ayotte’s answer to DOGE, which she packed with NHGOP insiders, her cronies, and her donors. COGE produced “hard-hitting” recommendations such as “creating ‘sponsorship and naming programs’ to generate money from state-owned parks and recreational sites.”
House Bill 1706, which would repeal the Department of Health and Human Services’ refugee resettlement program and prohibit any state expenditure on refugee resettlement, recently had a “public hearing,” which exposed what a farce Ayotte’s COGE was:
DHHS cannot say how much is being spent on refugee resettlement, the sources of the funding, how the money is being spent, etcetera. COGE was either unbelievably incompetent or chose to cover up what appears to be programmatic abuse of taxpayer dollars.
The members of COGE strike us as supporters of refugee resettlement. For example, Drew Kline, after Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, was a vocal advocate of resettling thousands of Afghans in New Hampshire, claiming that the Granite State does not have enough cheap labor:
New Hampshire expects only 100-200 Afghan refugees. Even10 times that number would not be enough to provide a statewide economic lift. But for the businesses desperate for help, every hire matters.
So our guess would be COGE chose not to look too closely (or at all) at refugee resettlement because refugee resettlement is something the members support.
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