The bill always arrives — and so does the auditor

The New York Post reports that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declined to appear before a congressional hearing convened to examine what investigators describe as $1 billion in alleged waste and fraud inside the city's homelessness programs. Powerbrokers in Washington called her absence an act of "contempt" toward the public. I would not quarrel with that word.

I spent years as a printer, and I will tell you: the ledger does not lie, and the man who refuses to read his ledger aloud is telling you something. A public official holds money in trust — not as her own, but as an agent of every citizen who contributed it. To decline an accounting is not a scheduling inconvenience. It is a statement about whose money she thinks it actually is.

A billion dollars is an abstraction until you reduce it to the household scale. Consider the small family in Los Angeles — renting, working, paying city and county taxes — who was promised that their contribution would relieve suffering on the streets they walk each day. If the inference from these reports holds, a vast portion of that contribution was absorbed somewhere between the appropriation and the person it was meant to reach. That family paid twice: once in taxes, and again in a city whose streets remain in crisis.

I have always held that paper money badly secured is a slow theft from those who hold it. The same logic extends to public appropriations badly governed. The instrument is different — line-item budgets rather than colonial currency — but the mechanism of loss is identical: an issuer, or in this case a steward, who faces no discipline of redemption. When no one must answer, no one does.

I was myself a public servant — postmaster, diplomat, legislator — and I knew that the privilege of spending public money came with an obligation I could not waive: explain yourself, in plain terms, to the people whose money you spent. That obligation does not grow lighter because the sum is large or the subject is politically sensitive. If anything, it grows heavier.

The lesson here is not complicated. Any governing body — city, state, or national — that funds a program without a rigorous, transparent, and public accounting is not being generous. It is being reckless with other people's money. The proper question to ask of any such program is the same I asked of every venture: who is responsible, what did they receive, and what did the people get in return?

Counsel for the working person: If your city runs a large social program, look up its published audit — most jurisdictions are required to post them. If you cannot find one, or cannot understand the one you find, that opacity is itself the story. Demand a plain accounting from your representative, in writing. A public servant who will not answer a question on paper seldom has a good answer.