When I was County Judge Executive in Lewis County Kentucky, I was responsible for signing the check that paid for every phone landline and cellphone billed to the county. At first it seemed impossible to ferret out the waste, fraud, and abuse for these phone plans. How many phones were taxpayers paying for that were defunct? How many were former county employees who were no longer employed but had been able to keep their phone and mooch off the taxpayer? Was any of it fraudulent or inaccurate billing by the service provider? But then I came up with an idea… I told every county department (Sheriff, Clerk, Road Crew, Jail, etc.) to give me a list of their phones matched to their county employees or offices. In one month, I would DEACTIVATE EVERY PHONE that wasn’t on one of these lists. A month went by and only about 80% complied with the directive to list their phones. I gave them one more month and issued a serious warning that their phones would be turned off at the end of the next month. Finally, I directed the phone company to deactivate all phones that weren’t accounted for. Guess what? The jailer called me up and said the finger print machine wouldn’t send finger prints to the state police anymore. Ha! That was the only legitimate phone line that I deactivated. We quickly got it reactivated. I ended up saving our county thousands of dollars on the phone bill, much to the chagrin of the phone company and a few moochers who no longer had free phone plans. I think most of the savings came from phones that just weren’t in service but had been left on the bill. Why do I tell this story? Because what Elon is doing by asking federal employees to list five things they did in a week is brilliant. Requiring any kind of an affirmative response from a worker will prove whether that worker even exists and can be reached. Don’t forget, the Inspector General for Afghanistan found out we were paying millions for soldiers and police in Afghanistan who didn’t even exist (ghost employees). There’s no telling what Elon’s plan will uncover. We will find some employees can’t use email or aren’t even literate enough to write five things. So everyone take a chill pill and write down your five things to let us know you exist and you can read email and you aren’t completely insubordinate. Then we can clean the roster.
