State Auditor John Dougall thinks the best place for a congressman to serve Utah is in the weeds.

After two decades of working to lighten Utah’s tax load and shed light on government waste, Dougall says he wants to bring his penchant for problem-solving to the nation’s Capitol representing the state’s 3rd Congressional District.

But selling constituents on the importance of welfare reform and budget reduction is a problem to solve all on its own.

As a former state lawmaker and tech entrepreneur, with graduate degrees in electrical engineering and business from Brigham Young University, Dougall said he believes the Republican Party of late has been less interested in outcomes than political point-scoring.

“The Republican Party used to be the party of big ideas,” Dougall said. “We have nothing but infighting, squabbling, performative politics.”

Dougall was ready for retirement from public service following his 10 years in the Utah House of Representatives and 11 years overseeing the state auditor’s office, he said. But he said the absence of “any real budget hawks back in D.C.” drew Dougall to Rep. John Curtis’ soon-to-be-open seat.

“I’ve got a unique skill set when it comes to these issues,” Dougall said. “And I think the financial matters, the debt, the out of control spending, the dysfunction in Washington, D.C., this is one of the top national crises.”

Creative solutions to the nation’s biggest money problems

For those who don’t feel the same sense of urgency about the country’s balance sheets, Dougall has a thought experiment.

Imagine a Utah household making $100,000 a year and spending $130,000 with the help of a credit card. The monthly minimum credit card payment would exceed most Utahns’ biggest budget item, their mortgage, Dougall said, making it harder to pay for essential needs and leaving the family at the mercy of steep interest rates.

In fiscal year 2024, Dougall pointed out, the United States is expected to pay more on interest payments to service the national debt than on national defense — a sober milestone that comes on the heels of federal debt surpassing $34.5 trillion for the first time, increasing by a rate of roughly $1 trillion every 100 days.

Dougall has incorporated an interactive “Balance the Federal Budget” tool into his campaign website to help voters visualize the problem. The feature is similar to the property value and public education tracking tools that he developed as auditor to help Utahns follow their tax dollars and access government information.

The country’s biggest problem has “no single silver bullet” solution, Dougall said, but “we can’t just keep doing the same thing because we’re going to get the same results. We’ve got to try and be more innovative, we’ve got to try and push big ideas to try and solve these very, very difficult problems.”

For Social Security — the retirement benefit program that drives more than one-fifth of federal spending — Dougall proposes a shift to state sponsored retirement trust funds modeled after 529 college savings plans.

This would allow workers to opt out of Social Security benefits, which are projected to be cut by 20% in a decade. Workers would then be able to invest that portion of their payroll tax into a state sponsored investment fund “to get them a better, more secure retirement” while giving Democrats the government oversight they demand to protect all workers, Dougall said.

Such a massive overhaul of Social Security would have to be phased in, with different age cohorts being allowed to allocate more or less of their payroll tax, Dougall said.

When it comes to government-provided health care for the elderly, however, Dougall said an overhaul doesn’t go far enough.

“I don’t want the federal government running Medicare better,” Dougall said. “I want to get the federal government out of health care.”

Enabling competition with government provided health care, facilitating direct care models and reimbursing procedures the same regardless of location would result in hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, Dougall said.

“It won’t balance the budget, but it’s a big step in the right direction,” Dougall said. “And it can put patients more in control of their health care so they can get better quality care.”

Subsidized health care programs for low income Americans, like Medicaid, also need to be stripped of federal involvement, Dougall said, with funds and oversight being handed over to the states, instead of the “split-funded” system currently in place that creates a “mismatch of accountability” that incentivizes states to grow Medicaid rolls, Dougall said.

Block-granting Medicaid funding to the states and expanding work requirements for “able-bodied individuals” would result in another $100 billion in annual savings, Dougall said — far short of the $1.7 trillion deficit in 2023, but one of the many trade offs needed to make federal spending look more like a responsible home budget.

The government watchdog candidate

Dougall has more time in government than any of his four opponents in the Republican Party primary election. The crowded field of five also includes Roosevelt Mayor JR Bird, Sky Zone CEO Case Lawrence, commercial litigator Stewart Peay and state Sen. Mike Kennedy.

Dougall took over the state auditor’s office in 2013 after ousting a longtime incumbent in a primary election. As auditor, Dougall held officials accountable and reviewed the state’s COVID-19 expenditures, database security and implemented programs to make government financial information available for “essentially every state and local entity in Utah.”

Dougall also emphasized transparency during his 10-year tenure as a state lawmaker which immediately preceded his time as a state auditor. He contributed to the public meeting notice website and pushed to repeal the state’s vehicle inspection program, which required added bureaucracy with little benefits to show for it, he said.

In 2005, Dougall was a member of the Tax Reform Task Force that led to the passage of Utah’s biggest restructuring of the tax-code in decades, which included a 5% single-rate income tax.

These policy wins were the result of focusing on how to get a solution across the finish line without worrying about “who gets the credit” or “the next election cycle,” Dougall said — an attitude he plans to bring to the contentious halls of Congress.

“I will work with anybody who’s willing to fight out-of-control spending, to try and rein in the federal government, to try and balance the budget,” Dougall said. “I’ll work with anybody, I don’t care who they are, because that’s what it’s going to take.”

Dougall’s other priorities include securing the southern border and ensuring American energy dominance. He also believes the U.S. should continue to provide “targeted assistance” to Ukraine to stop Russia’s advance and prevent a bigger war in Europe.

Dougall — John ‘Frugal’ Dougall on the ballot — will face his four primary opponents on June 25. The Republican who wins the primary will face off against Democratic candidate Glenn Wright on Nov. 5.

Correction: An earlier version said Dougall has spent 10 years as state auditor and that he was co-chair of the Tax Reform Task Force. He has been state auditor for 11 years and was a member of the task force, but not co-chair.