We’re gonna need a bigger DOGE.

The Department of Government Efficiency, helmed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is tasked with trimming regulations, spending, and personnel within the federal government.

Amen to that. But overspending and inefficiency are not contained inside the Beltway.

As public payrolls published by the Boston Herald reveal, there’s a glut of overtime, mega salaries and layers of administrative bloat weighing down Bay State budgets.

Massachusetts needs a state DOGE, an entity charged with asking the tough questions that taxpayers want answers to: What does your office do? How much do you get paid? What do you do to earn that salary? What tangible results have you/your department achieved? Does another person or department do the same thing? Can Massachusetts really afford to splash out on supersized pensions?

In Bay State political circles, accountability is a campaign promise that goes back under wraps once the election is over. But what if fat cats’ feet could be held to the fire? What if pols had to address real-world issues before ticking off the boxes on an ideological agenda?

“The taxpayers deserve better,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said last month ahead of a meeting with Musk and Ramaswamy. “They deserve a more responsive government, a more efficient government.”

We do, and that should start locally.

As the Herald reported, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu in her first term has hired 301 new employees. A third of them earn more than $100,000.

Wu, in a Tuesday letter to the City Council, said the average salary among those newly created positions, added over a three-year period since she took office in late 2021, is $84,781.

The math on that hiring spree is $27.6 million, or 0.6% of the city’s $4.6 billion budget, which grew by 8% this fiscal year.

Ninety-seven of the new jobs are for city employees who were hired at more than $100,000 — with pay topping out at $194,300 for the July 2022 addition of the “office of people operations chief,” according to data compiled by Wu’s office.

That new-hire largess may be just 0.6% of the city’s budget, but it’s $27.6 million. You can fund a lot of vital services with that kind of money.

Which is why Boston needs a DOGE of its own. An addition of $27.6 million to a city budget that the mayor resists cutting while pursuing a move to shift more of the tax burden to commercial properties cries out for someone to hit the brakes, start asking questions and opening the books.

Our city and state are hardly alone in overzealous spending and hiring. Unfortunately, it’s taken crime spikes in cities around the country and the recent wildfires in California for the public to get a fuller picture of where their tax dollars are going, and what they’re not getting for the money.

In Southern California, residents assumed those in charge of funding fire departments and making sure they had all the resources needed to battle wildfires were on the ball.

After empty hydrants, LAFD budget cuts, and a vital Pacific Palisades reservoir being offline as flames engulfed homes and businesses has shown, the ball was dropped. Badly.

Musk and Ramaswamy have their hands full with the bureaucratic bilge that needs to be cut in D.C. But here’s hoping that DOGE is the start of a larger, nationwide move to fiscal sanity and accountability.

Editorial cartoon by Steve Breen (Creators Syndicate)