Former Secretary of Finance Steve Cummings explains how the Youngkin administration saved hundreds of millions of dollars a year through tighter financial controls: more internal audits, better cash flow management, stronger cyber-security, and attention to nuts-and-bolts financial management.

 Jim Bacon: Greetings, everyone. I’m Jim Bacon, and this is the Oinkonomics podcast. In our last podcast, we talked to former finance secretary Steve Cummings, who gave us an overview of the Youngkin administration’s fiscal and economic accomplishments. There was a lot more ground to cover, so Steve has graciously agreed to return for another round. This time, we’re going to take a closer look at the nitty-gritty aspects of keeping Virginia one of the most financially strong states in the country. Welcome back to Oinkonomics, Steve.

Steve Cummings: Thank you, Jim. Appreciate being back again.

Bacon: Last time we chatted, you touched upon Governor Youngkin’s thinking that the state secretary of finance should take a CFO-like approach to the job. Traditionally, the position has been organized around budgeting, budget forecasting, collecting revenues, paying bills, and managing debt. But the modern CFO does a lot more. So, let’s start with a high-altitude description of the job as you see it.

Cummings: I mentioned this in our last conversation that as I got into this role, I realized that many states have different structures to their Secretary of Finance function, and many of them have elected officials that are part of finance, but frankly, those elected officials really aren’t accountable to the Secretary of Finance. And that would typically be in the areas of controller or treasurer. And what’s distinctively different in Virginia from many others, is that it is structured like a true CFO office. I had planning and budget, I had tax revenue collections, I had fund management within Treasury and the group that does debt, and then payments that go outside to vendors and to other constituents that the Commonwealth owes money to.

You mentioned elements of finance you might call modern, but it’s more thinking of the Secretary of Finance in state government as like a CFO in the private sector, and it’s structured in a way to be able to function that way. Typically in Virginia, it really has been 90% around budgeting, revenue forecasting and collections, paying bills, managing debt, whereas in the private sector, the CFO responsibilities go well beyond that. Many behind-the-scenes activities aren’t visible to people but primarily provide better data and transparency to monitor things. As I say, we are the source of the truth. Finance should always be relied upon to be where you go to get the facts, the golden source of facts.

We’ve built a more informed and accountable finance team that understands how critical finance really is to everything in government. It’s the foundation upon which everything is built. Nothing happens without money. And then making sure the element of ensuring that risk, compliance, and control management are firmly in place and properly managed. You have to manage also the underlying finance, IT and risk management systems that support over 130 agencies in all their finance functions. And then of course, cybersecurity. But properly managing all of that provides good data for decision making, protection from fraud, waste and abuse — we’ve heard some things about that lately — and then making sure we’re efficiently using valuable resources and providing accurate accounting of those resources to make sure that we stay within our means.

Bacon: One of the traditional things that the Secretary of Finance has done is budget forecasting. That’s obviously crucial. And I think maybe you’ve made some improvements. My impression was that Virginia has always pretty good at this. Notably, it had the Governor’s Advisory Council on revenue estimates. What was your relationship with that group?

Cummings: It’s a prescribed process. There’s the Joint Advisory Board of Economists. They set up an economic outlook. And then several months later, as we get closer to presenting our budget, we gather the GACR group that you’ve mentioned, the Governor’s Advisory Council on Revenue Estimates, which now applies the business overview on the economic outlook. This is what we’re seeing. And then we take that away to come back with the revised GACR forecast.

There’s one required meeting per year. It’s a group of 15 to 20 very senior executive CEOs typically from a wide range of industries and geographies across Virginia. We’ve actually gathered them virtually four or five times a year in each year that we’ve done this. We found them to be incredibly helpful as we start to see things in revenue generation that we want to better understand and get a midstream update that might start to affect our thinking on how we start to respond with the kind of spend controls that we have in place. They give us guidance to put together 12 to 24-month forecasts. And as I think everybody knows, and I think this is the Virginia way, we have an economists’ forecast. We get GACR input. The governor takes that in. We as a team talk about it, and then we present the GACR forecast.

As you would imagine, we’re trying to be realistic. If we’re going to err, it’s going to be on the conservative side and allowing a cushion and then hoping for something better. And what’s happened for us over the last four years. In addition to good spend control, we’ve had a pretty robust economy beyond expectations. Eighteen months ago when we were going through the forecast, there was a lot of uncertainty. The election had just taken place. They didn’t know what was going to happen with the new administration. We put a big haircut on our forecast to provide for that. Things were obviously way better than expected. We did it again at year end when the governor withheld the $900 million of spend for capital expenditures as another cushion. And again, the economy has meaningfully exceeded that, all of which has led to that $10 billion of surplus that out of which, in addition to funding a lot of very important things, the Governor has put in place $9 billion of tax relief. So, it’s a careful balance. You don’t want to be too conservative because then you waste resources, you’re collecting money you don’t need. But you certainly don’t want to go over either because that has very severe repercussions. While we’re well prepared for that with our rainy day fund being completely full, you don’t want to go there. So, I think consistently the Virginia way has managed this very effectively.

Bacon: It sounds like you didn’t make big changes in that particular regard. You built on what was already in place, maybe more actively collaborating and consulting than in the past. But no great changes. But now, here’s an area where, if I understand it correctly, you did make some fairly big changes. You implemented what you call a Quarterly Management Review program of executive branch agencies. Tell us exactly, what were you trying to accomplish there and can you point to any tangible outcomes?

Cummings: When I first came in, not having experience in this world, I said to everybody, okay, what do you look at to monitor what’s going on with your numbers? It was fund accounting. Basically, you put the money in a fund and then you track its disbursement. You better not go over. That was basically it. You’re only watching those gross numbers. Well, I couldn’t handle that. I said, I’ve got to understand. And obviously this was with the Governor’s support. He said, let’s build a reporting system.

So, we built this where finance and primarily HR delivered packages once a quarter to the all the agencies, every secretariat and all their agencies in the executive branch. And that packet included a quick synopsis of accomplishments over the last quarter: Let’s celebrate, talk about some important things that have been completed, talk about some issues that are on the horizon. Then we go into the numbers, which is a newly reported report on spend categories that tracks monthly spend over the course of the year. And we look for anomalies. We look at it over a three-year period to say, okay, this has jumped meaningfully. What is that? Why is that? Is there a problem lurking or is there an underlying issue we need to be aware of? We look at people. We watchthis area closely. There’s a lot of extra unused resources tied up within HR where people plan for too many positions to be filled and that money doesn’t get spent, and it sits within the agency and then is carried over by them.

We look at big procurement, big contracts coming up within the next two quarters, and we show when was the last time that was procured. If it’s been not procured for some time, we’ll say, why aren’t we going out to test the market on this? We look at IT projects on time, on scope, on budget, key risks and the mitigants, making sure we’re on top of things that are on the horizon. Audit findings, external reports. Tangible things that come out of this are, we have identified several things, things I can’t really talk about, where some spending got out of line, and in two cases identified inappropriate activities that were taking place that we were able to jump in the middle of and get control of.

Also, a consistent part of our process as we approach the fourth quarter, which begins in April, we would identify areas where our spending was not on pace. It was clear that we are not going to spend the resources that had been appropriated. And in the fourth quarter, we put in place spend controls that basically said, you do not have discretion to spend those extra dollars on things that are not specifically approved in the budget. Prepayments is a common practice where agencies would prepay bills to use their appropriation. Therefore, they would make sure they ensured their baseline for the next year. And we put controls on that. The money that was held back, we would review with the Governor. He would release some things that were clearly appropriate, that were just delayed things that hadn’t gotten done. But more than half of that unspent money was actually swept back and was rolled into money that was now available for the next year of appropriation. It created $300 to $500 million each year that was now available to reduce appropriations needed for the next year. It didn’t add to the surplus because that’s a revenue surplus, but it added to available resources to be able to accomplish other objectives.

Bacon: $300 to $500 million a year. That’s a fair amount of money, even in a budget as big as Virginia’s.

Cummings: You would be shocked when we’re doing annual budgeting that at the end of the day, we’re fighting over one-, three- and five million-dollar things. When that 30 billion whittles down to a few drops left, that money is really important about what can get done and what can’t get done.

Bacon: Another emphasis in the in the materials that you shared with me was what you call financial-risk and control-management infrastructure. Previously, state government relied upon agencies to self-certify risk and control compliance. So, what are we talking about here? More rigorous internal auditing, or is it more complicated than that?

Cummings: Well, it’s not just more rigorous, it’s actually doing internal auditing because that practice had been stopped. In the private sector, we have a very important and highly managed process, each tier having to confirm that they are properly executing on their financial controls and reporting standards, and [we have] the state government’s ARMICS, which is Agency Risk Management and Internal Control Standards. Basically, we have a policy manual of financial policies and procedures that would stack up about two feet tall, and we focus on the high-risk areas. You get certifications that they are abiding by the controls that are built into the system. In the private sector, that is typically audited by an internal independent audit team.

So, we focus on high-risk areas. Examples of that are opening new accounts, which could be vendors, and monitoring spend to make sure it’s consistent with the intent of the appropriation, wiring of funds to external parties to controls over that. So, you go to the headlines that we’re seeing in Minnesota and in Maine, these are the things that break down. We’ve had experiences in Virginia of fictitious account names. When we arrived, internal audit didn’t exist. It had been disbanded and resources were moved to other things. Your end certifications were provided with zero independent validation. That’s called self-certification. You’d say you’d send a memo to a fiscal officer: are you performing consistent with the policies and procedures in this particular area? And they will certify and say, yes, I am. But no external checking.

Now, you don’t check everything, you’ll do it randomly, you’ll do it more times within a higher risk area and just to make sure you’re comfortable that people are doing it well. We went from zero internal audits when we arrived, and this latest year, we’ve completed 20 in high-risk areas. The next year, we’re tweaking the system a little bit. It’s expected to be more like 40 or 50, so that over a four- or five-year cycle, just about every agency is going to be audited at least once, but the high risk ones are going to be audited maybe even three times.

Bacon: It’s amazing to hear that there were no internal audits when you came in. It sounds to the layman, like, wow, that could lend itself to potentially a culture of abuse like apparently occurred in Minnesota. Now.

Cummings: Can I clarify one thing, Jim? There’re two forms of audits. You have APA (the Auditors of Public Accounts) doing financial audits, right? They’re doing GASB (Government Accounting Standards Board), the state government form of GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) to make sure financial reporting is proper. This is the other side, which is financial control. It’s a really important distinction. APA is performing as they should be. It is really important to make sure that the proper controls for looking after the money and other good execution is taking place.

Bacon: The fact that this type of control didn’t exist when you came in the door… when you started putting those controls in the place, did you start catching stuff?

Cummings: What you have when you do an audit, you have findings. It’s just like in a financial audit, you get material weaknesses, significant deficiencies. We had a lot of findings. We found some things that you could classify as mistakes that got through. There were a couple cases where there was fraud in terms of account opening that were caught pretty early. You can have an inside job where they collaborated to set up bank accounts and fraudulent vendor names. That’s akin to what happened in Minnesota. Yeah, that’s the stuff that we found. A major area that is important is the P cards, which we certainly dug into in a deep way.

Bacon: Let’s go ahead and talk about the P-cards.

Cummings: P-cards, those are small purchase cards. These are credit cards like we all use every day. And every agency typically has at least one. When we came in, lots of agencies had way too many and issuance was not well controlled. And it’s for small purchases. It’s stuff that you don’t want to go through the whole invoicing process. And you set up accounts where appropriate. You have approved vendors you can go to. And our [program] was one of the biggest in the country, over a billion dollars of spend. As you can imagine, when I was told that, I said, OK, how does Virginia get to be the biggest P card program in the history in the country? And it was basically a decision was made years ago to max this out and really push the agencies to use it aggressively as long as it has proper controls.

There are many stories around the country. In fact, you’ll probably recall recently in Richmond, where this is an area that there is a history of fraud and abuse because you can spend it on personal items. If the limit is 10,000, you can do three $9,000 expenditures. Unless you’re tracking for repeat numbers like that, you’re not going to catch it. So anyway, we dug in, we worked with B of A (Bank of America), who’s the vendor on it. We set up some AI capabilities to track the spend. We limited issuance of cards into agencies. We cut off more types of products they could be used for and we got it all done, I’d say. Now you can’t get reimbursed unless you have digitally filed all your receipts. This was all done manually before, also with self-certification, by the way. At the end of the day, I would say we were pleasantly surprised because the incidents that might be classified as fraud were actually quite low.

There were a lot of mistakes. I truly categorize them as mistakes. But now everybody knows we’re watching it very closely. And I think it’s a very effective program. B of A has said it’s one of the best programs in the country. And with all those controls, the spend has come down by a couple $100 million. But it’s still a big program.

Bacon: Now, when you say the spend has come down a couple $100 million, that sounds pretty good. Is that just that people not using the P card or is it actually reducing actual spending?

Cummings: It is controlling the use of the P card. Our spending is not coming down. That would that would be nice, but that wasn’t the intent. It was to make sure that it was all kosher activities that were done the right way.

Bacon: All right. Every business person understands the concept of working capital. And apparently that was not exactly a best-practice area for Virginia. Among other accomplishments, you managed to reduce a lot of late payment interest and penalties and free up a lot of cash. Can you talk about that?

Cummings: This is a really interesting one. And it was kind of a midstream revelation. Just it came up in a conversation at a QMR. And we got into vendors and talked about payments. And Virginia abides by a prompt-pay rule, which says Virginia will pay its bills to their vendors in 30 days. And I learned in one of those meetings that actually, some of the agencies were paying immediately. The bill came in and they just hit send and that order would go through DOA, Department of Accounts, and would be executed. If we could have held that money for 30 days, that was a loss of a resource that we earn interest off of. And when interest rates go from 2% to 4 to 5%, It was real money in the beginning. It’s real money now because this was a pretty significant practice and it just wasn’t managed.

On the other end, we had a certain agencies that were paying late. And we paid $6 million in penalties for paying late when we’ve got $30 billion sloshing around in our accounts. So, no reason for that. We just turned it into a working capital project. At DOA Scott Adams, who was our controller at the time, did a fantastic job on this and other things. We’re going to track everybody and you’re going to report when you pay, when you pay early, and when you pay late. And DOA is going to be more of a control mechanism to make sure that we have an alert and make sure those things don’t happen, especially on the early pay. And I couldn’t give you an exact number, but we definitely picked up somewhere in the $30 to $75 million of incremental penalty savings or incremental interest income.

Bacon: You stack all these savings together and they actually they add up to real money.

Cummings: And it doesn’t it doesn’t hurt anybody. That’s the frustrating part: these things are just good execution, good common sense. But in state government, everything is so decentralized that everybody does it their own way. And if you don’t apply your controls on the top end, it’s very difficult to optimize much of anything.

Bacon: Moving on, the Secretariat also modernized its financial IT systems and capabilities. How much did that cost? It must have been an upfront investment. What kind of concrete benefits can you point to as a result of it?

Cummings: Two things I’ll talk about in finance, because this was a priority of the Governor. Secretary [Lyn] McDermid, who was CIO at the Richmond Fed, really focused on this. We had within our cabinet reports a tracker of all IT projects. We’d pause and look at things that were shifting status from green to yellow to red so there’s a conversation to find out what’s going on because state government’s notorious for poor execution in IT. In finance, I’d say the two big things are first, the core ERP system, Cardinal, which has a financial function and HR in one package, PeopleSoft. And they installed the finance package starting 10, 12 years ago. They got partway done with it. And then they found they were end-of-life on the old HR system. I don’t know how that was such a surprise, but they had to shift all of their resources off finance over to HR, which means they never really finished the finance package. As a result of that, over 50 agencies had to build their own to close that gap. And you can imagine what that looked like, because again, there’s no consistent way that comes top down from VITA (Virginia Information Technologies Agency). Getting that all implemented, getting it connected to the rest of the system, just led to all kinds of inefficiencies. And they really wanted, now that they were living with those, they were going to end-of-life themselves, saying, we need a better package.

So this goes back to DOA. We thought we had to replace PeopleSoft. We thought we were going to go to cloud. That’s going to be an incredibly expensive project. And there are, say, about a dozen states that are in the process or have tried to launch in cloud. Nobody has done it successfully yet. And so through great work from our controller, Scott, we broke it down, detailed review, 230 agencies they talked to, and we now have a 5- to 10-year plan to optimize what we have and get ready to go to cloud in 5 to 10 years based upon what the rest of the world has done. With AI, who knows what that’s going to look like in three years, much less 5 to 10. So we spent some money. But we actually saved a tremendous amount of money by just doing good work and really digging in.

The other one is the tax system, the core tax system called ERMS, implemented 20 years ago, old, one of those that’s in code that not many people still can really manage. In the tax world if you’re looking at policy options and if you’re going to implement new taxes, you better have a modern system so you can manipulate it and test it and all that stuff. Since 2017, they had paid for three different studies, and never got approval to proceed. And we had a new head of Commissioner of Tax and we got that done. It’s a $132 million project that’s going to take the next three or four years. It’s well underway, really in great shape.

This is the problem. It’s like building big buildings in the state government. Those are big commitments and there is a lot of hand-wringing about doing them because when you approve it, you’re going to go through a couple administrations of getting it executed. IT is even worse. And nobody loves to do IT because it’s a burden to multiple budgets, but it’s why we’re so far behind. Because we do it so infrequently, we are just not well staffed to do a good execution. Actually, VITA is doing a nice job of building a SWAT team that’s going to be leading these large implementations. So I think there’s a lot of good stuff that’s has taken place.

Bacon: Very similar in scale and importance is the issue of cybersecurity. We hear a lot about ransomwares of government, state and local government. There’re so many things, so many issues here. What was lacking in the system before you came on board and what have you done to fix things?

Cummings: My former life was a banker. My last stop was I was CEO of a $6 billion revenue bank owned by the Japanese, highly regulated by the Fed, by the OCC, by the SEC. And I spent most of my regulatory time on cyber. And as you can imagine, that is top of the priority list. If you look at finance, what I would say to everybody as I was pulling my team together, hey, folks, we’re going to do things differently. We are the bank. We collect the revenues. We manage those funds when they come in to optimize them, and we pay all the bills through DOA.

Why do you rob a bank? It’s because where the money is. We are the number one target. And we had those three agencies, which is the core, all doing it differently, completely independently, different tools, different standards, different tracking, and at much different levels of maturity of execution. So, I said, I don’t care what you say about the incidents. We got to get this fixed. And this started 18 months ago. We did a full assessment. What I wanted was a single leader of finance bank to make sure we built a steady, consistent ring around our bank, and that we shared resources, we had common tools, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And over that 18-month period, we did that and we staffed, we were supported. We briefed money committees on this two years ago and said, we’re going on this journey. You know this is a risk. Everybody talks about it, but they don’t do anything about it. And we’re gonna now do a real plan to be able to show you this is where we are. And it’s going to scare you. And this is where we got to get to.

Long story short, we’ve made huge progress. And it just it really wasn’t that expensive because VITA has all the capabilities. It just didn’t have that unified plan. And so we brought in some really good talent and we’ve closed so many gaps. You’re always chasing the Holy Grail because it’s always a moving target. But we’re in really good shape. And the thought on this, working with VITA, is that this is a model that could be applied in different high-risk areas. Many of our agencies, they’re just not high risk. But for those that are collecting funds or dispersing funds or paying big vendors, all are now going to be following a playbook, assuming that this will continue with the next administration.

Bacon: Without knowing exactly what the problems were that you uncovered, I guess it’s reassuring to know that you feel the system is safer. It might be too terrifying to describe exactly what the holes were that you filled in.

Cummings: You’ve seen a couple [of incidents] where there was ransomware and shut down some very important parts of Virginia government for some time. That’s indicative of some exposure. It’s not uncommon to see other states where tens of millions of dollars have gone to Nigeria overnight through cyberattacks. We all said we’re not going to be a headline.

Bacon: Good, good, good. One more thing to get into the weeds is the issue of financial transparency and opening up the books to the public and the layman. One of the things that you’ve done, which I thought was pretty cool — I don’t know how much attention it got – was the fact-packed database allowing people to see data on key metrics in the higher education area. Can you talk about transparency in general and maybe a little bit about fact packs?

Cummings: Love to. This was an awesome project, collaboration of DOE (Department of Education) and finance. Again, higher ed is really not transparent at all. I’ve been on a board of a university, and I won’t say negative things about that, but the lack of publicly available information, including to boards of visitors who rely on the information that is fed to them, we said that not acceptable ever, but in particular when you have a system under stress because of declining enrollment, it’s only going to get worse. The awareness of financial challenges has to be front and center, and in fact, needs to be the context that you do strategic planning within.

Historically, budgets grew 1 to 3% every year, and you know, that makes life pretty easy. Well, they’re probably growing faster than that, their budget needs, but still, you’re not going to get into real challenge. That’s not the case anymore. We set out to create this fact pack, which details every university in the Virginia system. We went through financial metrics and then we went through outcome metrics. We did it and SCHEV (State Council of Higher Education for Virginia) was involved in this. All of these are posted on the SCHEV website as institutional fact packs. You can hit a tab for any university, and you will see the same financial reporting that is validated by every institution as the truth, and it is now being pushed to all the trustees. They know that they can go get there. It’s used, I think, pretty consistently by the administrations in their board sessions and is the baseline context of what’s going on each individual institution.

At the beginning of this, they didn’t like it, obviously. Sometimes transparency is painful. Many times it is. And they said, wait a minute, you can’t test me with the same metrics. If I’m UVA, you can’t compare my metrics to a smaller independent liberal artsy school. And my answer was always, listen, I get my physical every year and I’m taking the same physical that somebody 50 years younger than I am getting to get my baseline. That’s what we’re doing here. And that is an opening for you to ask good questions and understand trends. It supported the strategic planning process, which is biannual in detail. And we actually told them, you do your strategic planning process assuming that enrollment is flat, which is frankly, for the whole system is generous given what’s going on. But in the past, everybody would project it’s going to continue to grow at 1% to 5% when everybody knew that was just wholly unrealistic. So it’s a great resource. Encourage people to go and look at it within SCHEV institutional fact packs. It’s great work.

Bacon: The General Assembly has been in session for almost two months now, and it’s been making some pretty significant changes to the budget that you and Governor Youngkin submitted. Do you have any reaction to what you’re seeing?

Cummings: I’m really concerned about two things, and they are for the future financial health of the Commonwealth. We talked last time about how the flywheel is creating an environment that is going to support good growth, healthy growth in the Commonwealth, attracting and supporting existing businesses to encourage them to continue to grow and hire more people in Virginia. I just see over and over again things that are being discussed — nothing’s done yet, but you can see which things are on track to get done — are not going to be very attractive to the people that we were talking to in many cases. And that’s going to be problematic because there’s so much. While we had the $150 billion of commitments and 85,000 jobs, they’ve still got to get done and we’re not paying them up front. They’ve got to get their project done in order to get our incentives, so you’re not going to lose that way. But you’re gonna lose the project. They’re gonna say, okay, this is not the state I thought I was signing up for.

So, I’m worried about that, and I’m really worried about affordability, cost of living. It’s not just getting the companies to come here. We still have tight unemployment. We’re at three and a half plus percent now. That’s still, in my economics course, low employment. And, so, the job market, despite what people might say, is still pretty darn tight. And we got to have more people coming here who want to live and choose to live in Virginia as opposed to go continuing to go down 95 and go to the states to our South. They’re not doing what we’re talking about doing right now. So, we’re expanding the base for sales and use taxes. I mean, that’s huge. Taxing digital products. More importantly, it’s talking about taxing everyday services regardless of your income. It’s a very, very regressive tax policy. You go get a haircut, you’re going to pay tax on it, things like that you never even thought about you would have to do. So, I’m worried just about the tone and the messages that are being sent out to the world. And we’re going to sound a lot more like people who are losing population.

Bacon: As we close out this interview, I’d like to give you an opportunity to wax philosophical about financial governance. Once upon a time, say 20 years ago or so, there was a broad bipartisan interest in seeing that government was well run. Today, politics are dominated by cultural war issues in which efficiency and government doesn’t really factor. It strikes me that Democrats mainly care about social justice issues and redistributing the wealth. For example, I mean, just look what’s happening up in Minnesota, rather than getting outraged by the Somali welfare scandals, they’ve kind of swept all that under the rug, at least tried to. On the Republican side, we had DOGE, which had some positive accomplishments, but really at the end, barely dented the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse that supposedly exists. How critical is good financial governance going forward, particularly given the fiscal pressures that the country faces and by extension that the Commonwealth of Virginia faces?

Cummings: I’m a private sector person. I’m a taxpayer. I came in with the attitude of we’re here to deliver great things for Virginia but do it in the most efficient and effective way we can. And it starts with transparency. If you’re not in a position where you are willing to present the facts of what is happening and expose the challenges, the problems, then you’re never going to get it done. And I think that’s what happens. Every year, another layer of the onion gets added on to the underlying budget, and it’s never optimized. And it is hard to go back and look at how do I take things out from the past. We went through some exercises like that. And while some stuff was identified, we didn’t feel at the time was a fruitful effort, given other things that we were focused on. But I think that it is getting everybody to agree that while we might have our political focus on priorities, that we’re all better off if we optimize what we have and spend it better on the things that we do prioritize, spending more of it on the things we prioritize, including managing resources so we don’t overtax our stakeholders.

One of the first things [the Spanberger] administration said in the executive order on affordability, was we’re going to go after waste. I haven’t heard a word on that since. And I think there’s an executive order that they were going to go through an exercise. Maybe you’ve heard it, but I haven’t heard another peep on it. So, we’ll see.

Bacon: Steve, thanks so for your contribution to the Commonwealth of Virginia. And I hope you enjoy your retirement now that you’ve moved back to North Carolina.