If the job is spending money, who you gonna call?  

The federal government. 

In 2003, the Elko Daily Free Press reported Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest Supervisor Bob Vaught – pressed by a local lawmaker and others protesting the Forest Service’s actions in closing off access to the public lands in Jarbidge Canyon – admitted spending $15,000 to hire Enviroclean Septic Service out of Twin Falls to swoop in by helicopter and clean a single outhouse at Snowslide Gulch at the end of South Canyon Road, in lieu of accepting an offer by Assemblyman John Carpenter, R-Elko, and local contractor Mike Lattin to arrange for the work to be done by citizen volunteers for free. 

Why? Because, to accept that offer, the Forest Service would have had to allow the public to enter its own public lands. 

But $15,000 was chickenfeed compared to an expenditure first celebrated by USA Today in late 1987, when the newspaper reported “Sometime in the summer of 1988, in the wondrous high country of Montana’s Glacier National Park, construction workers will put the finishing touches on a new federal building.  

Designed by six architects and engineers employed by the National Park Service, the two-story structure is truly unique: a $1 million, four-hole outhouse that will serve only a few thousand of the two million visitors who flock to Glacier each year. … 

Belt Tightening? Naw, We’re The Gubbimint