Elon Musk was stupefied to discover official records of U.S. federal employees stored 230 feet below surface in a limestone mineshaft in Boyers, Pennsylvania.
I wasn’t. Anyone who worked on Capitol Hill should not have been surprised at all. The biggest surprise was some of the process has been modernized and digitalized even a tiny bit.
There are computer systems at the IRS still running on assembler code popular in the 1960s. Yes, our federal government is that archaic and inefficient.
Seven hundred local Pennsylvanian citizens (voters) manually process 10,000 applications for federal retirements each month in Boyer. That’s a whopping 500 applications per work day. Assuming 200 people work to maintain the facility, each agent completes one application per day.
One. Per day. Per agent. On average. Some days, they may not complete any.
I wondered why it took so long to process my retirement papers from OPM (Office of Personnel Management) when I applied in 2020. I thought it was delayed by COVID. Apparently, they were using an abacus to calculate the benefits I was due for 12 years of public service as chief of staff to Congressman Alex McMillan and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole.
The frustration I experienced when filing for the OPM benefits came flooding back to me. The instructions were so complicated they might as well have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
How can this be possible in today’s world of advanced supercomputers, AI and secured online technology?
Politics. Plain and simple.
The 700 voters who work in the Iron Mountain facility are, no doubt, good, hard-working people. They are not trying to scam the taxpayer or advance any agenda. They go 238 feet into the ground every day and push paper around instead of digging for limestone like their grandfathers did with lighted headlamps.
Then they go home to the family they support with salaries and benefits derived from their federal employment down that deep hole.
Why is this facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania, anyway?
There must have been a powerful House or Senate appropriations chairman from the area in 1950 who wanted to provide jobs for 700 voters in his district.
That’s the only reason why.
Subsequent representatives and senators from Pennsylvania got elected and promised those 700 voters the same thing: “I will not let them close this OPM facility!” as he stood at the front of the open cave receiving raucous applause.
And they didn’t. Those jobs are still there. They are the only jobs available in the area.
Elon Musk and DOGE are doing taxpayers an amazing public service shining a bright light on the sheer immense inefficiency and waste in government.
Forget the hysterical apocalyptic howlings from the left: The biggest hurdle to a massive reduction in spending will come from Republicans who should support every spending cut anywhere ― but won’t.
In 1993, House Republican Budget Committee members and staff were discussing specific cuts in programs deemed to have outlived their usefulness and/or were considered “wasteful spending.”
A certain congressman from Kentucky, Hall of Fame pitcher and later Sen. Jim Bunning, spoke out forcefully in support of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) which spent a lot of their annual $500 million budget in eastern Kentucky. He said he would tear certain body parts off any member who voted to do so.
Bunning may still hold the modern-era major league record for hitting batters in the head with 100-mph fastballs. Everyone in that room knew he was not kidding.
The ARC remained untouched and unscathed. Bunning was a solid fiscal hawk on almost every other score ― except this one.
This is where DOGE is going to encounter its highest resistance. It will be any Republican in a tight race who will fight tooth and nail against any cut to their vested interest because they don’t want to lose 700 votes in places such as Boyers.
Votes are the lifeblood of any elected official, not saving money.
As long as the waste, fraud and abuse discoveries are only about ferreting out and ending taxpayer money going to dead people, crooks, criminals and Nigerian internet scams, the American people will love what DOGE is doing.
There should be a ticker tape parade down Constitution Avenue if Musk and DOGE delete $1.7 trillion from annual federal spending overnight and balance the budget without a tax increase, just like many on the right have said for decades.
There have been exactly zero acts of bravery on either side of the aisle when it comes to spending restraint in Congress since 2001. This may be the last chance any of them will ever have to be a hero.
