Elon Musk is right, there is waste in government. No question about it. Just as there is waste in most every household and every business in America.
There is no such thing as 100% efficiency. Not everyone gives 110%. Not every good idea, new product or well-intentioned program bats a thousand. And not every kid eats everything on their dinner plate, including the green vegetables.
That doesn’t mean you get rid of your kid, close down every business, cancel every project or fire every worker.
A responsible leader would look, learn and listen before wielding a dangerous chain saw.
But Musk and his political partner, President Donald Trump, won the election and the chance to prove their points. So instead of criticizing the Cutter in Chief, I’d like to give an example of how I dealt with government waste.
It’s a true story, just in case readers have grown used to my sarcasm.
In 2010, I was appointed to lead the federal office in charge of helping developers get their permits lined up so that they could build the multibillion-dollar Alaska North Slope natural gas pipeline project. I inherited from my predecessor a Washington, D.C., downtown office space measuring almost 15,000 square feet — occupied by just seven employees. The space was so oversized that everyone could have a corner office, there were three conference rooms, two kitchens and the furniture was a gorgeous cherry wood tone.
The director before me thought it was important to plan for growth, in case the pipeline went ahead. That office was so big you could have built some of the pipeline sections in the lobby.
The agency could not afford the $750,000 annual lease, so I asked the General Services Administration — one of the agencies Musk has criticized — if they could find a tenant to share or sublet much of the space.
Their bureaucratic response was that I first had to “deconstruct” the space. That was a new term to me, so I asked and they explained that it meant take down walls, put in new doors and completely reconfigure the floor plan in the hope that some other federal agency would like the remodel job and move in.
Seemed pretty stupid to me to spend several hundred thousand dollars to “deconstruct and reconstruct” the floor of an office building for an unknown tenant of unknown needs.
I ignored the GSA and asked the gas line agency’s administrative services director to inquire at other federal agencies to see if anyone needed temporary lodging in a building just three blocks from the White House. Desks, cubicles, conference room, kitchen, furniture, American flags all included.
Turns out a mining safety agency had recently expanded after a deadly coal mine disaster and needed immediate office space for new hearing officers and staff. We put up a freestanding partition to cut a long hallway in half and they moved in, cohabitating with us. That’s all it took.
The mining safety agency paid the gas pipeline agency, we paid the landlord, and we both saved a lot of money for the U.S. Treasury.
Life was good until the gas line agency needed to move out of the space; even with the tenant, it was too expensive. I called the GSA and said we were leaving, but our cohabitants would like to stay.
The GSA told me I had no authority to sublet, even if it saved the government money and made perfect sense. They reminded me about the deconstruct-first, ask-questions-later rule.
So as much as Musk mocks the GSA and all the federal procurement and personnel rules, he actually is following them. He is deconstructing government first, asking questions only when he feels like it.
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