Public floods Missouri’s Musk-inspired DOGE portal with calls to protect abortion rights
After Missouri lawmakers launched a new portal designed to emulate billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, emails from the public quickly rolled in.
“Please stop wasting taxpayer money on spending your time trying to overturn Amendment 3,” one read.
“MO Attorney General Andrew Bailey should stop filing frivolous lawsuits,” said another.
“Continuing to state run the KCMO police department costs additional taxpayer money,” someone added.
Missouri state senators have touted the new initiative, called MO DOGE, as a way to seek suggestions on how to trim government waste. Who better than the public to identify inefficiency? That’s how the thinking went.
But more than 5,000 pages of emails obtained by The Star show that Missourians have inundated the committee — and staff — with messages supporting abortion rights. Hundreds of messages warn lawmakers against attacking Amendment 3, which voters approved in November to overturn the state’s abortion ban.
Numerous emails also call for Missouri to give control of Kansas City’s police department to local officials, attack Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s headline-grabbing lawsuits as wasteful, and call the DOGE initiative itself a poor use of resources.
The documents signal that Republican lawmakers have largely ignored those messages. Instead, they have publicly highlighted and focused on select issues, including many aligned with their existing priorities.
Lawmakers have crafted a spreadsheet of 70 top submissions received through the portal that did not feature the messages in support of Amendment 3 or complaints about Kansas City police and Bailey. Some include complaints over Missouri’s handling of chronic wasting disease among deer, while others hone in on allegations of local government corruption or the requirement that vehicles have two license plates.
The emails obtained by The Star cover a longer date range than the committee’s spreadsheet, which includes messages from Feb. 5 to Feb. 7. But during that period, lawmakers still received emails about abortion rights, Bailey and Kansas City police, among other topics.
The submissions also include joking, off-topic, threatening and even racist messages. The script of “Bee Movie” was sent in several times, for instance. Others offer advice to lawmakers laced with sexual profanities.
But ultimately, the DOGE spreadsheet provides only a small window into the entire collection of emails — and provides no evidence of the flood of messages supportive of abortion rights and other positions at odds with many Republicans.
Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, an Arnold Republican who chairs the committee, said her office is only publicly highlighting complaints considered to be “substantive.” She defended the decision to omit the scores of submissions on abortion, police and Bailey, arguing those issues were not within the committee’s scope.
“The things that we didn’t include in that were really a very, very broad sense of — is this a substantive concern or not?” Coleman said, adding that the committee did not include submissions related to specific legislation or officeholders such as Bailey.
But the decision to omit hundreds of messages related to those key issues — as well as the DOGE initiative itself — has raised eyebrows from critics who say the effort is both misleading and a waste of time.
“This appears to be an attempt by the supermajority to root out programs and policies that don’t align with their values,” said House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Kansas City Democrat. “It’s an endeavor that’s being taken on not in good faith.”
Coleman said the committee can highlight additional messages in the future if there are concerns about the committee being “under-inclusive” with how it chooses complaints.
“It just didn’t seem to be substantive ideas for the committee to be working on,” she said.
Missouri ‘DOGE’ effort
The Missouri Senate Government Efficiency Committee launched the portal earlier this month, calling on residents to identify and eliminate government waste, duplication and inefficiency. The portal takes its name, and stated goal, from a recently formed federal initiative led by Musk.
Throughout the messages reviewed by The Star, “Amendment 3” or “abortion” are mentioned more than 600 times.
“Amendment 3 was approved by the people. Now the MO legislature is spending taxpayer dollars and wasting precious time trying to overrule the people’s will,” wrote one person, who listed their address in southeastern Cape Girardeau.
The messages largely take issue with Republican lawmakers, who have filed a raft of legislation to reinstate some level of abortion ban after voters enshrined the right to the procedure in November. While lawmakers appear at odds over how far to go to limit access, the issue is expected to receive a significant amount of attention during this year’s legislative session.
For example, Coleman, the committee chair, has filed a proposed constitutional amendment that would ask voters to ban all abortions with exceptions for medical emergencies and rape. Coleman, a staunch abortion opponent, had repeatedly railed against Amendment 3 in the lead-up to the November vote.
Another member of the committee, Sen. Patty Lewis, a Kansas City Democrat, pointed to the flurry of messages supporting abortion access in a statement to The Star.
“Clearly, the public is concerned that efforts by the Legislature to overturn the will of the voters on the issue of reproductive rights is an inefficient use of time and a waste of taxpayer dollars.” Lewis said. “I hope the committee turns its attention to finding real ways to protect taxpayers and make life more affordable for all Missourians.”
Other submissions to the portal call on Missouri officials to return Kansas City’s police department back to local control as the city remains the only one in Missouri without direct control of its police force. The current structure relies on a five-member board of police commissioners with four members appointed by the governor. Only one elected official, the mayor, sits on the board.
“The board running the Kansas City Police Department is extremely expensive and ineffective,” one person from Kansas City emailed lawmakers. “Stop wasting resources on the board and have Kansas City be responsible for their own police.”
State officials routinely defend the makeup of the board, saying it’s a way to curtail crime and a history of corruption. But local leaders have regularly framed state control as an example of Republicans in Jefferson City attempting to blunt a more progressive and diverse city’s ability to govern how its citizens are policed.
The messages touting local control come at a pivotal time for debates over policing in Missouri. State lawmakers and Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe this year have prioritized legislation that would place St. Louis police under state control, an effort that could dampen future efforts to regain control of Kansas City’s police.
Both Kansas City and St. Louis have high populations of Black and Hispanic residents — St. Louis with 48.2% combined, and Kansas City with 38.1%. Both are led by Black mayors. And the state’s two biggest cities also regularly elect more progressive politicians than other parts of Missouri.
Attorney general criticized
In addition to the messages about abortion and Kansas City police, Missouri’s Republican attorney general is mentioned by name 238 times in the emails reviewed by The Star. The vast majority of those submissions accuse Bailey of wasting state resources to file frivolous lawsuits.
“I would like to report on the frivolous lawsuits that MO Attorney General Andrew Bailey has been filing against corporations to punish them for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion,” wrote one person from Harrisonville. “This is an absolute waste of MO taxpayers’ money.”
Bailey, who was elected to a full term in November, has been a polarizing figure since being appointed to the office in 2022. The first-time officeholder has regularly made overtures to right-wing social issues through a bevy of lawsuits, including against the federal government.
Most recently, Bailey filed a lawsuit against Starbucks, alleging that the coffee company’s diversity initiatives discriminated against white applicants and employees. The lawsuit claims that, since 2020, Starbucks’ workforce “has become more female and less white.”
The Republican attorney general last week also teamed up with a group of Christian counselors in a federal lawsuit challenging conversion therapy bans enacted in Kansas City and Jackson County. The lawsuit alleges that the bans, which prohibit the scientifically discredited practice of altering LGBTQ residents’ sexual identity through therapy, violate the First Amendment.
“Require Andrew Bailey to spend his time protecting Missouri consumers, not fighting a losing culture war,” another person from St. Louis wrote in the DOGE portal.
When informed by The Star about the swath of messages, Bailey spokesperson Madeline Sieren defended the attorney general in an email. She pointed to an “outpouring of comments” the office receives supporting Bailey as well as his “very active and robust” social media following and positive messages sent to the office’s constituent services department.
“Attorney General Bailey’s lawsuits are hardly frivolous to the overwhelming amount of Missourians who put him back in office by historic margins for a full four-year term,” Sieren said, later adding that The Star should look “at the whole picture, not just where you want to look to build your specific narrative.”
‘Sex and the City’
Even though many messages excoriated Bailey and other politicians, other emails struck a more comical tone.
Lengthy portions of “War and Peace,” if not the entire novel, were submitted. Lyrics from hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar and various movie scripts, including “Sex and the City,” “Pretty Woman” and “Dear White People,” were also included.
And there’s a variety of off-color and bathroom humor. “Poop” appears 42 times.
The emails continue to come in. The Missouri DOGE portal remains active, meaning anyone can continue to submit their own thoughts on government efficiency – or anything else on their mind.
“The truest form of waste,” one person wrote, “is paying someone to sift through these reports.”
This story was originally published February 14, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
