Zia Yusuf resigns as Reform’s DOGE chief with project in turmoil

New misery for Farage’s Musk-inspired project...

Eternal political shapeshifter Zia Yusuf (formerly Reform’s chairman, and now its head of policy) has today stepped down as the head of its ‘DOGE’ unit.

The DOGE team was Yusuf’s brainchild, and him resigning is a damning indictment of its performance to date.

In case you’re not aware, the DOGE unit is an echo of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, originally created by far-right tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Yusuf’s idea was to apply the Musk playbook to the 10 councils that Reform won in May, slashing and burning public services under the guise of finding “efficiency savings”.

His plan – which he touted through a series of widely-publicised trips to local authorities – was to commission a group of tech gurus to audit council spending and find dramatic cost reductions that would save billions while maintaining the quality of public services.

This was fantasy politics – a fact that even seems to have dawned on Yusuf, who has given up after just five months.

Post-2010 austerity has forced councils to bludgeon their budgets – stripping back their services. There’s nothing left to cut – as demonstrated in Reform’s flagship Kent County Council, which recently followed Reform-controlled West Northamptonshire and Durham by admitting that it was likely to raise council tax to plug its funding shortfall.

And there have been further embarrassments this week.

As reported by LeicestershireLive, Reform is set to launch a major “savings” review in Leicestershire County Council. However, rather than using its DOGE unit (which was explicitly set up for this sort of job), it’s going to pay external consultants. Reform, ironically, repeatedly complained about the use of taxpayers’ money on consultants before May’s local elections.

I’m not particularly irked about Reform not using its DOGE unit. As I’ve written before, there are some major corruption red flags around tech bros being handed the keys to local council budgets. But it does strongly signal that the DOGE dream has disintegrated on impact. Especially when you consider that only one member of the team has been publicly announced, that the unit has faced a bunch of thorny legal obstacles, and has essentially lied to the public about the savings it claims to have achieved.

Reform deputy leader Richard Tice has now been forced to pick up Yusuf’s poisoned DOGE chalice. You do wonder why he continues to accept the worst jobs in the party, despite basically bankrolling Farage’s operation.

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