Cost-effectiveness can’t trump everything 

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency noted on X their discovery that “federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania” Tuesday. Apparently, the facility employs 700 people, over 200 feet underground, processing around 100,000 applications per year, which are then stored in boxes and brown envelopes. This processing can last many months, according to the intrepid boys at DoGE. The clear implication was that they had uncovered yet another absurd and archaic operation, needlessly long-winded and ripe for automation.

I must confess this was not my reaction. I am generally sympathetic to the idea of lean, thrifty government. But I also have a strong romantic streak, a fondness for the eccentric and the peculiar and the anachronistic. I have always been fond, for example, of “Swampy,” the hippy activist who rose to prominence in the 1990s road protests, even though I suspect that we would not agree on very much if we talked politics. I always enjoy meeting people with obscure hobbies, or who have learned an unusual language to keep their mind sharp. And there was something irresistibly charming about the idea of an obscure government organization, ploughing their lonely but indispensable furrow in the back of beyond, safe from digitization and modernization and efficiency drives. Perhaps the place was run by some improbably old-fashioned manager, with an old-fashioned WASP name, the last man in America to wear tweed to work.  

As it happens, my sentimental fantasy was just that, a fantasy. I am reliably informed that the facility is actually administered on behalf of the US government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) by Iron Mountain, a gigantic multinational corporation specializing in information management and secure document storage. So there we go; not a whimsical backwater but the modern age in arms, a branch of a Leviathan with tentacles in fifty-eight countries.

Yet what happens to all those records and Manila files under the new DoGE dispensation is anyone’s guess. Perhaps there is a cheaper way to organize USG retirements. Perhaps in a few years’ time the mine will have been sealed up, and the necessary work will be done by an AI or by a much smaller staff of humans in a nice sensible air-conditioned office in a big city. Maybe it will save a few million dollars for the hard-pressed American taxpayer (yes, the US debt stands at something like $36 trillion). 

All the same, dare we hope that the all-seeing, unforgiving eye of DoGE does not entirely eliminate all the little oddities and wrinkles from the federal government? 

In my country, Britain, there was a considerable kerfuffle last year when it emerged that both the British Library and Oxford’s Bodleian — both legal deposit libraries who are obliged to acquire a copy of every book published in Britain — were only acquiring electronic copies of many books, rather than physical ones. It seems like a trivial squabble, but equally it touches on something important: cost-effectiveness can’t trump everything. There is something human and unique about a physical document, even if it is more complicated and costly to store and look after. The idea that every last area of government spending must justify itself in terms of pounds, shillings and pence is decidedly one-eyed. That’s how we end up losing park-keepers and school playing fields and public toilets and branch lines.