Republican governors tried to slash state budgets. They have advice for Elon Musk.

Before Elon Musk and his chainsaw, there was Mitch Daniels “the Blade.”

The former Indiana governor and Office of Management and Budget director under President George W. Bush, Daniels established a reputation in the early 2000s as a knife to government. As governor, he shrunk the size of his state's workforce by 18 percent and turned a $700 million deficit into a $2 billion surplus.

Daniels even doled out refund checks to Hoosier taxpayers on the backs of the cuts.

Now, he and a crop of like-minded former GOP governors are looking at Musk and President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency with a bit of nostalgia, uncertainty and — in Daniels’ case — caution.

“I certainly would have cautioned against throwing out a number that’s just preposterous,” Daniels told POLITICO of the $2 trillion Musk has set as a benchmark for DOGE savings. “There’s a real value in an effort like this because they illuminate the fact that the government does a lot of very silly or unnecessary or even counterproductive things, but I would have urged that they go achieve some real success first and then talk. Talk less, do more.”

It’s not just Daniels. Former governors of Illinois and New Jersey attempted similar, albeit less aggressive, moves to cut government, sometimes stymied by the same bureaucracy they tried to eliminate.

The Trump administration has suggested it’s not doing anything new, invoking President Bill Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative headed by Vice President Al Gore as an example. Musk even gave a hat tip to the Clinton White House, recently posting “What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s.”

Who can forget the time Gore promoted the effort on David Letterman’s late-night TV show by taking a hammer to a government ashtray.

In interviews, the former GOP governors outlined successes and pitfalls of their respective approaches. Former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner said it was “very, very, very tough to shrink” the government in his state, while former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie acknowledged making some cuts to human services he quickly regretted — forcing him to backpedal.

“I did a bunch of line-item vetoing and by definition that's done more quickly because a bunch comes, and you have a certain period of time to do it. There were cuts to human services that wound up affecting kids in ways that I didn't anticipate they would, and so I went back and changed it,” recalled Christie, a longtime Trump critic and former presidential candidate. “I took some abuse for it when it happened and I deserved it. I made a mistake, so I think when that happens, you just have to go ‘OK. I made the mistake, now fix it.’ It’s not like the mistakes are never going to be made.”

Daniels once even put pennies on the tires of state-owned vehicles to see if they were used. When he came back a month later and the pennies were still there, Daniels himself served as auctioneer and sold the fleet of 1,000 of them. He even cut the state’s force of planes and helicopters from 22 to 6.

But none of those efforts were anywhere near as chaotic as Musk’s DOGE, which has come with multiple instances of employees being fired and then re-hired, most notably nuclear weapons program workers and workers responding to the spread of bird flu.

“Personnel costs are such a small part of the money federal government spends and wastes,” Daniels said. “I think they don't want to over emphasize that, because it hands the friends of the status quo a club: You know, you're hurting these innocent people.”

Daniels, like Trump, had a Republican legislature to back him up. Rauner and Christie weren’t so lucky, facing resistance to their efforts to reduce government from Democratic-led state legislatures. And then there are outside pressures, similar to the legal challenges facing Trump.

“There are all kinds of restrictions and union rules and regulatory rules for what you can do as an executive versus what needs legislative or other approvals, including union approvals and employee approvals,” Rauner said in an interview.

Rauner was a Daniels acolyte who “studied what he did” and even tried to poach some of the Indiana governor’s staff. One top lieutenant made the move. But if Rauner’s Turnaround Agenda was designed to overhaul state government, his proposals left him butting heads with the Democratic-led Illinois General Assembly, and resulted in a more than two-year budget impasse that saw social service programs drastically cut or eliminated.

He said Republicans believe the Trump administration “deserves credit for trying [to reduce government] because nobody else, literally nobody, has been willing to do it at the federal level in anything like this scale and speed.”

And he compared Trump’s sledge-hammer approach to how the corporate world operates — “move fast and break things that are broken. And most Republicans regard the federal bureaucracy as broken. So I think they’re trying to do what a lot of people would support.”

That’s except for one thing. Rauner acknowledged he wouldn’t cut education. “It’s the most important thing we do collectively as a community and as a society,” he said.

Like Rauner and Daniels, Christie, a former two-term governor of New Jersey, has been watching closely at how Trump’s team is trying to recreate government.

Christie argued a lack of transparency is the biggest problem with the current reinvention of government.

He pointed to the recent flub in which DOGE “accidentally canceled” efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development to prevent the spread of Ebola. Musk said the initiative was restored, but those kinds of mistakes don’t sit well with the public.

“That’s why I think you should be going through a process where people know what you’re doing and that you’re doing it in a transparent way by examining it before you cut it,” said Christie. “Here, I think it’s the opposite process.”

Daniels, perhaps more than any national figure, has long argued that the U.S. faces a debt timebomb — a thread he referred to in a 2011 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference as the “new red menace.” (The speech received raucous applause: “times change!” he said.)

In the same speech, notably, Daniels trotted out the idea of a taxpayer refund — setting aside money for taxpayers “beyond a specified level of state reserves.” Today, he argued that a DOGE tax credit would be a “giveaway as crass as what Biden tried to do with student loans.” Daniels later signed into law the taxpayer refund, and taxpayers have benefited from it at least three times.

Back then, Daniels also argued for presidential impoundment authority, the ability to not spend money appropriated by Congress, an idea on which Trump also campaigned.

“Nothing radical about it,” Daniels said now.

Daniels isn’t opposed to Musk’s project. But he said it’s his native OMB that has the real “authority” to cut more deeply into the bone.

“I want to see them build the case for restraint by doing some things that are effective,” Daniels said. “The sky won't fall. I've always said you'd be amazed how much government you’d never miss.”

But the cuts he thinks Trump and Musk can achieve are incremental, Daniels said — doubtful Trump and Musk will find the kind of cuts they’re looking for.

“This president has taken off the table the only way you’d ever get close to such a number, and that’s entitlement reforms,” he said. “If they won't touch Medicaid, then they don't have a chance of doing much that's real.”