Reform’s DOGE unit is a major corruption red flag

Farage is sending a secretive squad to take over local councils...

Donald Trump is politically toxic in Britain. He has defunded life-saving services, harassed and deported his political opponents, and given massive tax breaks to the rich. All in the space of six months.

Even America seems to be slowly waking up to the nightmare of Trump’s punitive second term – his approval ratings this week dropped to a record low of 42% (although that number is still unnervingly high).

But that hasn’t stopped Nigel Farage from forming a Trump impersonation operation through his ‘Reform DOGE’ unit.

Modelled on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency – whose cuts to the U.S. aid budget could lead to 14 million deaths by 2030 – Farage’s unit is designed to pillage local councils.

Led by the party’s former chair Zia Yusuf, the unit is marching into the 10 authorities that Reform now controls following May’s local elections, causing an almighty stink.

It claims to have a vanilla ambition: to find “efficiencies” in local government.

However, in reality, Yusuf and his mob are the stormtroopers for a far-right austerity agenda that involves gaining access to council data, politicising and maligning any council spending on asylum seekers or immigrants, and rabidly destroying services designed to help vulnerable people.

This is bad enough – but when you dig into the details of the DOGE project (as sadly few media outlets have actually done), it gets a whole lot darker.

According to Yusuf (you can read more about him here), there are 12 members of the DOGE unit, ranging from business “leaders” to data analysts.

However, we’re not allowed to know any of their identities. In fact, even some of the councils that are being set upon by these vandals haven’t been told the names of those involved.

That’s the first major problem.

The second is that the unit is doing its work for free.

On the surface, that sounds like a good thing – altruistic entrepreneurs offering their time to fix problems in local councils.

Let me be clear: it’s very much not a good thing.

Corporate leaders are essentially being given free rein to obtain council data – including on procurement (i.e. council spending on external contractors) – and embed themselves in the operation of local government.

The initial work may be free of charge, but who’s to say these businessmen won’t expect a quid pro quo – in the form of council contracts, for example – for their labour? And how will we know if this has happened, if we don’t know their identities?

On this point, I thought it was very interesting that Reform has requested information from West Northamptonshire council about the performance of the “Pothole Pro”, a piece of machinery from JCB that apparently fixes potholes at lightning speed.

Farage launched his local election campaign on a JCB – a firm owned by major political donor Anthony Bamford, who has paid for the Reform leader to be flown via helicopter to JCB sites.

Farage used the campaign launch to tout the Pothole Pro, saying it should be used more widely, and it seems his DOGE unit is trying to build data for why councils should be buying more of them.

Now, I have no idea if Bamford has any role in the DOGE unit, or if any contracts will be heading in JCB’s direction, but Reform’s council hit squad is wide open to corporate interference – without any transparency or accountability.

After all, Reform has given no details (and likely never will) about how the members of its DOGE team were appointed. One thing’s for sure: they certainly weren’t appointed democratically, with scrutiny from party members and the media.

It’s highly plausible that some are Reform donors (indeed one of the few known people involved, Arron Banks, is a major Farage backer) – meaning that the party will have handed control of council decisions and budgets to its patrons.

While promising a “new kind of politics”, Farage is quietly outsourcing local power to a secretive, unelected clique of anonymous businessmen and tech nerds, many of whom may have financial stakes in the outcomes.

The DOGE unit isn’t a fix for broken government; it is the rot – opaque, corporate, and fundamentally anti-democratic. As I’ve written before, Reform is peddling the same elite cronyism it pretends to fight, just with a Union Jack draped over it.

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