Be your own DOGE

Many of us have enjoyed seeing Elon Musk’s minions combing through federal government expenditures to reveal staggering amounts of waste and abuse, but you don’t have to be a computer whiz named Big Balls to uncover government inefficiency or corruption in your own backyard.

This is especially true in Wyoming because city, county and school governments are required by state law to publish an account of their spending in the local newspaper each month. The system of newspaper public notice was intended as a means to keep government accountable because it is designed to encourage citizens to view lists of local government expenditures while they peruse other news of interest to their
community.

We honor that intent by making every public notice we print available for FREE on our website newslj.com. Simply click on the Public Notices Tab and scan through minutes, budgets, bid notices and expenditure reports to your heart’s content. We understand that it can be harder to find newspaper notices for some governments in Weston County because they do not publish them in the News Letter Journal, but you can view all of those notices for FREE on our website — even though they weren’t published in our newspaper. Simply click on the Wyoming Public Notices ad at the top of our NLJ public notice page, then click County in the menu on the left and select Weston from the pull down.

We also respect the need to preserve these records and ensure they can’t be altered, so we designate several copies of each issue of the newspaper to be archived with multiple sources so they can be referenced for years to come. Stop by our office, the library or the state archive to study up on decades of government spending if you’re looking for a reason to get out of the house!

Given the popularity of the DOGE effort, we are more proud than ever of the role the News Letter Journal plays in the tradition and practice of newspaper public notice, and we’re hoping that the national headlines will motivate our readers to pay closer attention to the legal notices we publish and use them to help ensure accountability in their local governments.