Note to Public Servants: It’s Not Your Money.

Our federal government spends more than $1.7 billion a year to maintain 77,000 empty buildings.

In 2016, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations.

When President Biden decided to spend $320 million on a giant pier outside Gaza to deliver food trucks, the pier was broken apart by strong winds and heavy seas in its first week. Hey, what’s another $320 million when it’s not your money?

Whenever I see public servants squandering taxpayer money, that’s exactly what I want to scream: It’s not your money!

Of course, these public servants are rarely held accountable for what they do with the money that isn’t theirs. The system is such that they have no incentive to be prudent, let alone thrifty. I guarantee you they’d be a lot more careful if indeed it was their money.

I know– I haven’t told you anything new. Saying that government squanders money is like saying that politics is divisive.

So I’m happy to relay that a group of fiscal commandos is bringing a ray of hope to our nation’s #1 problem.

According to news reports, Elon Musk and his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) team have identified a little-known but critical federal office, run out of the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, that is responsible for disbursing more than one billion payments annually, representing $5.4 trillion, or 88 percent of all federal payments.

The public servant who oversees these payments, David Lebryk, left his job last week after more than 35 years of working for the government.

Evidently, he wasn’t very cooperative with the DOGE team that sought access to the Treasury computers that process all these payments. Clearly, the “fiscal commandos” need that access in order to identify any fraud, abuse and waste, which sounds like common sense to me.

A few days later, it was announced that the new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, gave DOGE full access to the system.

Wait a minute: Am I dreaming?

Seriously, you can be the biggest Trump hater in the world, and be repulsed by his blizzard of executive orders, and still be in awe at this bold initiative to monitor where $5.8 trillion of your money is going.

I don’t know how much waste Musk’s team will be able to slash once they have access to the system, but I’m pretty sure that in Lebryk’s 35 years of public service, no entity like DOGE ever asked him for that kind of transparency.

In fact, for decades now, leaders from both parties have virtue-signaled their alarm at our fiscal time bomb but never had the guts to do anything. Much easier to kick the can down the road and keep borrowing more money.

It’s not as if the red flags weren’t staring them in the face.

During the 2023 fiscal year, for example, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the government made $236 billion in improper payments — three-quarters of which were overpayments — across 71 federal programs. They report this stuff year after year and our runaway debt just gets exponentially worse.

Musk suspects the government is sending out hundreds of billions to people who either do not exist or are fraudsters. As he posted on X recently: “Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress.”

For my friends on the left who can’t stand Trump, put your partisanship aside and consider this: In 2023, we paid $659 billion just in interest on the national debt, a 38 percent increase versus 2022. The Congressional Budget Office predicts we will add an average of $2 trillion in debt annually for the next decade; over $5 billion of debt every day for the next ten years.

In other words, leaders of both parties have failed us, to the point that we’re now forced to borrow $200 million every hour just to stay solvent. So, to all those who complain that they don’t trust Musk, do you trust those failed leaders and bureaucrats? The ones who led us into this fiscal ditch in the first place? What did they do to help our country besides send us barreling into insolvency?

One of the best parts of a democracy is that public servants report to us, the public. We are their boss. They need to know that they’re dealing with our money, not theirs. The public servant at the Treasury who oversees $5.4 trillion in federal spending also reports to us.

We not only have the right but the duty to hold our public servants accountable. Given that our country is fast approaching bankruptcy, we should be grateful that this process has finally begun.