Let’s face it—we’ve all got the gold bug. When President Trump announced recently that he would conduct an audit of the Fort Knox gold reserve, it was all anyone could talk about.

A friend asked if I thought the gold was still there. I would like to think so. I would like to think military discipline didn’t completely erode under the Obama and Biden administrations. However, time, technology, and the cleverness of rats mitigate against it.

A gold bar weighs 27.5 pounds. How easy would it be to counterfeit a bar, skim-coat it with some gold, and then swap it out for the real thing on the shelf? That’s what some folks imagine has happened. Others think that the physical gold has been lent out, sold, and replaced with worthless currency or just 1s and 0s in some government account.

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We are told that there hasn’t been an inventory in 50 years. I’m willing to bet there hasn’t been an audit of site access logs or entrance videos, either. We’ve seen significant changes in access technology in the past few decades. I wonder if Fort Knox is using the most up-to-date methodology.

Every time technology changes, the old data is normally relegated to a box that will eventually be labeled and sent to the National Archive. These boxes are often forgotten in some dusty corner. Labels fall off. Nobody likes record management duty. Archiving records is the worst.

Unless the DOGE team comes up with a way to do it, no one will review 50 years of access videos and compare them (forensic audit) with hand-written access log books. That would be the only way to see how often there was access, authorized or unauthorized.

Oh yes, I can almost guarantee you that hundreds, if not thousands, of times, senior officials have accessed Fort Knox. They’ve brought their friends in to take a look around. How exciting that would be—surrounded by a king’s ransom of gold. I imagine there are photographs in private collections.

Whatever is found at Fort Knox, we all hope it will remain the physical gold repository for the nation. Knowledge that we have permanent material with intrinsic worth on hand is a comfort.

There is one technology that needs to be added to the facility: 24-hour camera surveillance. Let Americans be able to log in and keep an eye on their gold reserves for themselves whenever they like. Now that would be government transparency! POTUS and his entire Cabinet have been promising us transparent governance for months now.

Camera oversight is a technology we’re comfortable with. We watch the world around us on our phones. Space cams are taking us immeasurably farther away every day.

We’ve got nanny cams and traffic cams.

Dash cams and body cams.

Resort cams, snow cams, and beach cams.

Volcano cams and deep-sea cams.

We’ve even got eagle cams and panda cams.

It’s just like being there.

Why not gold cams at Fort Knox?

The American people would love it. As for the rats who might try to nibble away at the reserve? Well, they’d give up.

Anony Mee is the nom de blog of a retired public servant who X-tweets at oh_yeahMee.