The curtain rose on the Wyoming Legislature's fall drama production last Tuesday, and what a show it was. The Management Audit Committee returned to center stage, performing a farce where everyone agrees the ship is sinking but spends the afternoon debating how to rearrange the deck chairs.
Picture the scene: a room where the Department of Audit, led by Director Justin Chavez, tried to explain that the state's audit staff are stretched thin, juggling impossible workloads. The legislators nodded solemnly, then launched into passionate discussion about… reorganization.
Everyone spoke earnestly about "efficiency" and "transparency," though no one seemed to agree on what those words meant or how they might be achieved.
Chavez answered patiently again and again, until the script looped back on itself.
The committee's performance hit its stride when members began discussing "solutions." Instead of addressing the lack of staff, training, or funding (the actual constraints on the department's effectiveness), they fixated on redrawing the organization chart.
Apparently, in the world of legislative management, moving boxes around a flowchart counts as reform.
Wyoming's audit professionals are outnumbered, underfunded, and expected to monitor hundreds of entities without enough people. Yet the committee spent more time imagining new chains of command than discussing whether the chain has any links left.
That's not oversight. It's busywork with a gavel.
The farce turned punitive in Act Three. The committee hauled in three small entities under subpoena without ever inviting them to appear voluntarily. One was a special district, the other two small towns. None were hiding from accountability. All were already working with the Department of Audit to fix their findings.
In the play's most uncomfortable scene, Manderson town officials testified. The councilman stated clearly the subpoena was "both unnecessary and inappropriate" for a town already cooperating. They learned about it from Cowboy State Daily on July 9—the audit letter had arrived May 28.
The council member said the town inherited years of mismanagement from the prior administration and had been steadily repairing the damage with a volunteer council, a part-time bookkeeper, and almost no budget cushion.
But in this production, healing counts less than headlines, and subpoenas make better theater than support.
One lawmaker suggested consolidating audit functions to "reduce duplication," apparently unaware that most of those functions already operate on skeleton crews. Another floated the idea of requiring more reports to prove how efficiently reports are being written.
The director's quiet response was essentially, "We need people, not paperwork"; which landed with the thud of truth in a room allergic to it.
This is the pattern. When legislators lack the political will to fund competent oversight, they call for "reorganization." When that doesn't fix the problem, they hold another hearing.
The Management Audit Committee has become a perpetual motion machine of concern, always spinning, never moving.
The real issue is capacity. State auditors can't cover every town and district, and small local boards can't meet reporting demands without help.
Accountability without capacity isn't virtue.
It's cruelty dressed as oversight.
The Manderson councilman put it plainly: compliance could bankrupt his town in a year. That's not corruption. That's collapse by policy.
Can you audit the state by shuffling charts?
The answer is no, but the committee seems to believe that if it acts out the appearance of oversight long enough, the audience will mistake it for the real thing.
Farce works because it exaggerates reality. The tragedy here is that it didn't need exaggeration. Every time a legitimate concern surfaced about accountability, timeliness, or the workload crushing state auditors and small entities, political theater drowned it out.
Wyoming deserves more than a show. We deserve a government that invests in the work it demands, and legislators who understand that accountability costs money. You can't expect professionals to audit the entire state on a shoestring and then blame them for tripping over it.
When oversight becomes a spectacle and subpoenas replace support, the Legislature stops auditing government and starts punishing communities.
If this were a stage review, I'd give the October meeting three stars for enthusiasm, one for coherence, and a standing ovation for unintentional comedy. But this isn't theater, and the stakes aren't pretend. When performance replaces policy, when reorganization substitutes for resourcing, the curtain falls on more than a play.
It falls on public trust.
Wyoming deserves legislators who understand that capacity costs money and accountability requires investment. Next time your representative talks about "government efficiency," ask them if they voted to fund the auditors they're demanding answers from.
That's the difference between oversight and theater.
