There is a kind of worker of whom I’ve taken special note over the years. I call them task hoarders. They proclaim themselves highly skilled, so much so that no one else can possibly do their job. No one can even help. In fact, they put down the skills of everyone else. No one else is as careful, scrupulous, disciplined, and hard-working.
They make a huge performance out of it. They end the day in exhaustion. They get cramps in their fingers from all the furious typing they do. Their eyes are in pain from staring at screens. Their back hurts. But they proclaim themselves willing to undertake such terrible sacrifices because it’s just who they are. They care more than anyone about the mission.
And for this reason, no one can supervise them, no one can scrutinize them, no one can help them. If there is a stray task out there, they pick it up, adding endlessly to their heavy burden. People who say they feel bad are still kept at arm’s length. Such people are quick to call out the errors of others because it makes them look good.
It’s a kind of confidence game and it often works. Everyone treats this person as invaluable and even indispensable. Once you figure out the racket, it is very obvious. This person is building in job protection for themselves. They have cultivated the reputation of infinite value precisely to make sure that they will never be terminated.
Why might they fear termination? Here is where it gets interesting. More often than not, they are not very skilled. They are using old tools and will not upgrade. They don’t like supervision because they fear discovery. They know in their hearts that they are outclassed by others, perhaps even in the same office, but cannot let that be known.
The longer they are employed, the more the lies about their work continue. But even if people grow suspicious, others are afraid to call this person out because “everyone knows” that this person is a mighty and brilliant achiever.
I’ve seen this a number of times over the course of my career. Eventually, the fraud is exposed but only by an outsider who shows up and doesn’t believe that fog of invincibility that surrounds such a person. An outsider demands one little bit of information—such as “What software are you using”—and the whole thing comes crumbling down and spectacularly.
The task hoarder then decries the new boss as a despot who is ruining the company. Finally, the person quits or is fired. Once out of the building, everyone in the office finally admits their own intuitive incredulity. “I always had my doubts,” people suddenly say, and everyone agrees. There is a huge sigh of relief.
I tell the story because of what I’ve learned about a person called the “Fiscal Assistant Secretary of Treasury.” This person is the top career official at the U.S. Department of Treasury, the ultimate man of the system, with full access to all outgoing payments. This person is assisted by a handful of others.
The position is technically hired by the Secretary of Treasury—requiring no Senate confirmation—but always and by tradition from within the Treasury Department, a career bureaucrat who earns his way to that position from having hung around the agency for decades.
It’s been this way since 1939, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt reorganized the executive branch. Since then, the Fiscal Assistant Secretary has been one of the most powerful people working in government. We might say that he is the MOST powerful person in government because only he has full access to all outgoing accounts. Since 1939, these people have had control over more than $200 trillion.
Since those days, there have been 15 people who have held this extraordinary position. You have never heard of a single one of them. They are deliberately unfamous outside the bureaucracy. Within the agency, these people are considered awesome figures, controlling all, knowing all, access to all. No one else can compare. For all these years, this position has never been questioned.
What about outside audits? Forget it. Never going to happen. What about having an outside consultant look over the system? No chance! That would compromise work quality, risk data security, and reveal proprietary models.
Incredibly, this little game of task hoarding by the bureaucrats, and one in particular, has gone on for 85 years.
Remember the night of the inauguration? The new president attended one gathering after another. He did sign some executive orders on stage but then moved to the next party. He was cutting cakes, dancing with Melania, shaking hands, doing photo-ops, and so on it went until the wee hours, perhaps to 2 AM.
I was watching this and wondering when he was going to get to work as president.
The whole time, something else was going on. All these parties and photo-ops turned out to be a brilliant diversion. What was actually behind the scenes was unthinkable. The Department of Government Efficiency had gained access to the U.S. Treasury and had entered the secret domain of the Fiscal Assistant Secretary.
When the person in that position, David A. Lebryk, found out, he had a complete meltdown and protested with all the usual tropes: this is secret, this is dangerous, this is without precedent, and so on. He was correct that no president in nearly a century had penetrated this holiest of holies.
Knowing that he was facing dismissal, Lebryk resigned 10 days later, and his position was temporarily filled by another career bureaucrat before a complete outsider, Tom Krause, took on the role. Krause is now subjecting the nation’s books to normal accounting standards.
There was shock in the air when it was discovered that $4.7 trillion of existing government spending was not being properly categorized as being tied to any budget item authorized by Congress. This would be a normal thing in the world of business and accounting, just to complete the web of authorization. Such a normal standard was not even being applied. Now it is.
Intuition suggests that many more revelations are on their way. If my analysis of the task hoarder is correct, we might find that incompetence and worse have long been the normal operating rule. This pattern is very common in any institution. Task hoarders behave as they do for a particular reason, job protection and to keep prying eyes from discovering the inner workings of their private little world.
For decades now, transparency has been the watchword in business. It is precisely to prevent something like task hoarding from taking place. This is the reason for so much of how things work today in the private sector. What Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, is doing is bringing such standards to the operations of government, which is nothing radical except from the point of view of agencies that have gone for decades without anything like oversight.
It’s sad that we are only now discovering this but that’s how it happens. The task hoarder gets away with the tactic for only so long.
