A senior figure in a council's savings initiative has said comparisons to its Elon Musk-led inspiration "probably wasn't helpful".
Reform UK launched its Department of Local Government Efficiency (Dolge) scheme at Kent County Council in June, modelled on the billionaire's Doge advisory group to the US government.
Paul Chamberlain, a deputy cabinet member involved in Dolge, said: "Dolge is not Doge, it is a different approach."
However, Conservative councillor Sarah Hudson said Dolge was a "complete waste of time and money".
The Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) launched during Donald Trump's second presidency to cut federal spending and Musk initially led the controversial programme, but has since left.
The unofficial department has faced legal challenges over the scope of its work and been criticised for a lack of transparency and failing to reach its stated savings goals.
Reform UK launched its version with the then party chairman Zia Yusuf and tech entrepreneur Nathaniel Fried, both of whom left the scheme.
Chamberlain said: "It is about efficiency, it's about doing things differently - that's what we want to do, and doing things sensibly."
Asked if Dolge had been like the US scheme, Chamberlain said: "No, it hasn't been like that. I think we wanted it to; I think I wanted it to."
He added that "when you get into the realms of local government, you hit the bureaucracy" and data protection rules.
"You get all this stuff that just wouldn't allow that data mining to go ahead in the way that we would have liked it to," he said.
Reform UK's central team were not "here all the time", Chamberlain said, but there was "definitely a feeling that they're there if we want them".
The councillor claimed that the authority had made savings on home-to-school transport and adult social care, as well as changed its culture.
"I think we felt the savings would be there, perhaps because of Doge, but in reality, local government has been cut and cut and cut over many, many years," Chamberlain added.
"The best approach is of course efficiency, because we don't want to do cuts."
Conservative councillor Sarah Hudson said her party’s prior administration, which lost control of the council in May, had already “literally found every single penny”.
“We paired everything to the bone, every single penny that we could was spent on frontline services, and this is a complete farce,” she said, labelling Dolge a “complete waste of time and money”.
Reform UK councillor Matthew Fraser Moat stepped down as head of the Kent Dolge team on Tuesday, stating that he made a “lapse of judgement” after being quoted by the Financial Times saying that the authority had “not made any cuts”.
Chamberlain was quoted in the same article saying that he wished “we could have found those big savings” for ex-chairman Yusuf,“but we didn’t”.
He told the BBC that the quotes “got twisted around a little bit” and that said Dolge was “alive and kicking”.
“People get very triggered by Dolge for some reason and that shouldn’t be,” Chamberlain said.
“We’re looking at saving money,we’re looking at treating taxpayers’ money sensibly,and so I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want that.”