LONDON – Britain’s answer to Elon Musk hasn’t had the easiest start.

Reform UK – the country’s insurgent populist right-wing party — only set up its home-grown Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in May.

It has yet to gain access to data held by the local authorities it is scrutinizing. Two of its leaders rapidly quit, only for one to return two days later. And experts have slammed its “populist chainsaw” approach. 

But DOGE’s tech millionaire leader, Zia Yusuf, sees the unit – working in areas Reform won after a surge in May’s local elections – as a testbed for the party, should it hold onto its comfortable poll lead and win the next general election, expected to take place in 2029. 

Yusuf quit his Reform roles, including party chairman, for two days amid a fight over a burqa ban, but returned to lead the DOGE efforts. “I could be doing a lot of other things,” he tells POLITICO in an interview. “But it’s also very satisfying because we are making a big difference and no matter what attacks kind of come our way, we’re going to keep going.” 

The 38-year-old — who has made headlines this week with an attack on Britain’s Online Safety Act — would be in a prime position for a senior cabinet job should the party win power.

Asked what his dream role would be, Yusuf lands on what’s likely to be a hotly-contest gig in any Reform government. “I think chancellor is obviously a very interesting and important position,” he reflects, referring to the all-powerful finance job at the heart of the British government. “But, you know, ultimately, these are all decisions Nigel [Farage] will make, and I think he is a long way from making them. The talent density available to this party continues to grow very significantly.” 

Yusuf said that while he admires Musk as a businessman, he is less tied to the X and Tesla owner’s politics. “We only called it DOGE just because it’s really easy for everyone to understand what it is,” he says. “I think you can admire Elon as an entrepreneur. [But] Britain’s a very different country to the U.S. in lots of different ways… so we’re doing our own thing here.” 

Reform’s DOGE and its team of 12 software engineers, data analysts and accountants have started work in two of the ten councils Reform won in May’s local elections, with another four soon to follow. 

They use artificial intelligence tools to go through public data and hunt for savings with a focus on fraud, procurement and areas of spending which Reform views as a waste of public cash. Think taxis to take children to school, money for asylum seekers and spending on management consultants, which Yusuf calls a “gravy train.”

“Most of these people have not been politically active,” Yusuf says of the DOGE team. “It’s patriotism. It’s people who can see the way the state is being run has gotten worse and felt quite helpless to be able to do anything about it. For the first time, they can see something which has got some political teeth.”  

Government prep 

Yusuf talks a lot about the amount of money spent on social care. But it’s a service councils in England have a statutory duty to provide, meaning there is little DOGE can do to cut it. Despite these restrictions, he views DOGE’s work with local councils as a useful testing ground.

“We want to look at the way in which councils actually go about providing these services … It is helping us with the work that we’re doing in terms of our national policy platform, so that we can arrive in government and quite quickly start to implement these changes and tear down the blockages that are preventing, for example, local government from providing these services,” he says. 

The former investment banker became a multimillionaire in 2023 after selling the concierge app Velocity Black, which he co-founded, to Capital One for £233 million. A former Conservative supporter, Yusuf switched to Reform in 2024 and has since set about trying to broaden the party’s appeal ahead of the next general election. But Yusuf says his current task to cut local budgets down to size is just as important.

“If Britain doesn’t sort this out, then the IMF [International Monetary Fund] will force it to,” he argues. “The country is on a fast track to bankruptcy. The country is in a doom loop where the people with the broadest shoulders in terms of tax are fleeing the country. The pie isn’t growing in terms of revenue and so all of that’s going to be shouldered by the next wealthiest people. Predominantly, these are working people. There’s a real urgency about this. That’s my motivation.” 

His diagnosis of Britain’s core problems at times echoes the thinking of some in the ruling center-left Labour Party: An outsized civil service, ballooning spending on social security, and a chronic lack of economic growth. Aggressive use of technology, he believes, is the answer to some of those problems.

He accuses MPs of being behind the curve on AI and believes the technology is as strategically important to a country as its nuclear weapons. He argues AI could replace 80 to 90 percent of white-collar jobs in the next decade and would create “enormous societal change.”

“We need to wake up very quickly, because if we are not participating as we should be in this new world of AI, we are unilaterally disarming and letting the British people down. And to be brutally honest MPs do not understand any of this stuff. They’re completely asleep.”

If all goes to plan, Zia Yusuf could soon be waking them up.

Additional reporting by Dan Bloom