Earl is a temp on the claims-processing line at the center I own outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. He approves the disability checks your government mails you. His back has been failing since March. The largest functional reorganization in the history of my operation didn’t touch the back. It touched the thing that would have caught it. The reorganization cost me nothing. I keep the savings. You’re waiting on a check. May the Lord speed it past his hands.
Tyler Hassen wrote at the Wall Street Journal that DOGE works, that waste is real, that the critics who quibbled over the savings missed the point. He canceled $3 billion of contracts at Interior and calls it the largest functional reorganization in recent government history. He is right about the contracts. He has not priced a chair.
Now here is the part of the op-ed they didn’t print. I had one safety officer for 1,900 hands. That ratio wouldn’t survive an audit, so I consolidated the function into the line. The function was a woman named Darla, and Darla is Earl with a clipboard and a severance date. One rung up, same math. She cost me $62,400 a year. That was the waste. It had a name. All of it does.
I commissioned a survey of the floor the way the efficient do. It cost me $0.003 a head. The workers wrote that the backs were failing and the line was cruel. The findings weren’t actionable. I filed the findings, and the quarter closed on schedule.
Earl’s back gave out at 11:40 on a Tuesday. The discs were done. The accommodation the protocol requires is a chair with lumbar support and 10 minutes of rest every hour.
The chair costs $147.
Say that number slowly.
$147 for a man who has processed claims on my floor for 4 years. I have spent more than $147 on wine I didn’t finish. But the wine was for me, and the chair was for him, and these are not the same line item.
Earl isn’t on my payroll. He’s on the staffing agency’s, which puts him on my floor and off my books. Direct hire, with the tax, the leave, the back, would run me $1.14 an hour more. I declined the $1.14. You’re counting the way I count now. That’s the first day of the lesson. The claims get processed either way, by the same hands that aren’t mine.
He filed a claim. The claim went through my line. I processed it at the standard speed. 14 seconds. I denied it. My own standards, applied to my own hand, held. I want you to sit with that for a moment. A man broke his back on my floor, filed the paperwork his own fingers typed, and his own employer denied it using the same fourteen-second rubric he applies to yours. The system worked exactly as designed. I designed it.
I did not look up.
Widen the frame, because Mr. Hassen wants you to widen it with him. He wants a permanent efficiency office, a rotating corps of private-sector talent, data access across every agency. I’ve been running that office for 30 years. I don’t hold a seminar. I hold a chair, and I’ve spent those years grading men into the subtraction. The young man who repriced the staffing contract sat in my classroom 4 years ago, second row, and he ran the subtraction faster than I did. The textbook I wrote — Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation — is on the shelf at the consulting firm that priced your last position. The graduate who priced it is on a bonus structure I designed. I say that with a teacher’s pride, and I mean the word. The best of them see the differential before I do, and one of them set the wage on the job you’re afraid of losing. The flood of talent Mr. Hassen wants is my alumni. He is proposing me. He just hasn’t priced the admission.
The first efficiency consultant wrote his manual on a farm outside Rome in 160 BC:
“Sell the worn-out oxen, the blemished cattle, the blemished sheep, the wool, the hides, the old wagon, the old iron tools, the old slave, the sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous.”
That is Cato the Elder, De Agricultura, chapter 2. The old slave and the old wagon in the same list, filed under the same instruction. He priced the ox before the slave, and the slave before the question. I priced the salary before the spine. The order is the lesson. The textbooks change. The subtraction does not.
The parable was written for men in my line of work. The master left talents with his servants and went away. He came back and demanded an accounting. To him that had, he gave more. From him that had not, he took away even that which he had. The unprofitable servant was cast into outer darkness.
“Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.” — Matthew 25:27
I have not read that parable as a warning. I have read it as a job description. The wage I haven’t paid Earl is the talent the Master gave me, and I have put it to work. The chair he wasn’t given is the talent I have multiplied. The disability check in your mailbox is the usury I have returned with increase. The unprofitable servant is the one who would have bought the chair.
The doctrine has a feature I have come to admire. Every dollar I decline to spend on Earl is a dollar the Treasury doesn’t collect from my labor cost. That’s a dollar Mr. Hassen borrows in the daughter’s mid-twenties he prices in his own op-ed. That’s a contract he cancels. That’s a claim my center doesn’t process. That’s a vacancy I fill with a cheaper trainee. The circle compounds. I have not traced where the demand goes. I haven’t needed to. The quarterly number is the best it has ever been, and I am, on the whole, content.
Earl is still at his screen. The hands still work. The spine doesn’t. The claim you’re waiting on is in his queue, and his own claim is behind it, denied at the standard speed, in the standard number of seconds, by the same man whose back he broke, in the same fourteen-second sentence he’ll apply to yours when it arrives.
He’s still processing it.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.