Elon Musk posted on X that he wants to know about wasteful government spending and unnecessary regulations.  Let me tell you about my traveling kitchen table!

I joined the State Department in July 1998.  I came after a first career in higher education, which means I was around colleges and universities until my late 30s.  In college, you stuff your basic essentials into a car, truck, or U-Haul, move on, and live.

When I joined, we were supposed to report to Washington.  I figured that some time would elapse between the time we were inducted and trained in a language prior to our first posting.  So, when the State Department movers came to put my New Jersey home belongings into storage, I held back a kitchen table, some chairs, beds and mattresses.

Not knowing the largesse of government, and because it was only four hours to D.C., I stupidly decided to rent a U-Haul at my own cost and brought those items to Washington.

Now, when you joined the Department back then, you could expect six weeks of induction training (“A-100”) followed by some language training.  Most of my colleagues were assigned to Mexico, so Spanish was quick.

I got assigned to Belgrade, which meant 23 weeks of Serbian training.  By the time I finished the following February, U.S.-Serbian relations were at the breaking point as NATO prepared its bombing campaign against Slobodan Milošević.

Not being sent to post immediately, the Department assigned me to the NATO 50 Summit in Washington, then working on post-Soviet arms control.  The Department wanted to keep Team Serbia together because of its language training, convinced that Madeleine Albright would soon raise the flag over Iwo Belgrade.

By the end of the summer, that hadn’t happened and the rules then required me to be posted somewhere overseas. Long story short, I was sent to London.

That’s when my kitchen table came into play.

As we were packing out for England, I asked about putting the table into storage in Hagerstown, Maryland, where the Department keeps officers’ stuff not going overseas.  I was told I couldn’t.  “That was supposed to be stored when you left New Jersey.”

I said I did not know that and that I expected I would need it over the course of training which, in my case, became one year.  Still naïve about the largesse of government, I said if he could not pick up and store the table, could I take it by U-Haul to Hagerstown, drop it at the door, and have them add it to my lot?  “You’ll have to pay an accession fee!”

“So,” I asked, “what can I do?”

“You can take it with you.”

That made no sense.  Embassy housing in London is furnished, which meant I already had a kitchen table there, so why would I bring another table from America?

“You can store it in the basement storage room there.”

That seemed dumb, but then I asked: “Well, if my second post is also overseas and furnished, do I have to take the table there, too?”

“No.  You can then add it to our storage facility in Belgium.”

“Look,” I said, “I kept the table and chairs and old beds because I knew we’d need someplace to eat, work, and sleep while in training.”

“You should have rented those things in Arlington.  That would have been covered.”

For this bureaucrat, renting furniture for a year made more sense than using my own and just adding it to the government’s own storage facility in Maryland.

But then came the most telling line. I said, “I thought I was saving the government money!”

His deadpan response: “You are not authorized to save the government money!”

There you have it.  With that arrogant response, I decided I wouldn’t.  Accordingly, in the geographical brilliance of the 1999 Clinton State Department, instead of my grandmother’s 60-year old kitchen table going by truck from Arlington, Virginia to Hagerstown, Maryland, it went on a world tour.

It traveled to London and spent two years there.  My second tour was in Warsaw, Poland, which was also furnished, so my table got to relax in storage in Belgium.  Because my tour in Poland eventually ran four years, it was stored at government expense in Europe that long.

Finally, in 2005, I came back to Washington for my first domestic assignment on the Russia desk.  And Grandma’s table came back, too, from its six-year European vacation.

“You are not authorized to save the government money!”

Mr. Musk: If you have any questions about the mentality of taxpayer’s money stewardship, that should enlighten you.

Not only do we need to look at wasteful spending in progress, we desperately need to look at the enablers of that wasteful spending: Non-common sense regulations that think the best route from Arlington to Washington lasts six years via London and Belgium.

Mine is one example.  With the size of the federal government, one can only imagine how many similar silly rules are in place that in fact multiply costs unnecessarily.  Don’t just go after concrete spending, because what you cut will come back after you’re gone.  Go after the regulations that enable, even mandate, that waste.  That’s where the fixes are permanent!

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.