Shut off Cellphones Gov. Brown Tells Employees

Slashing California’s cell phone bill is job No. 1 for the state’s newly elected Democratic governor, the Washington Wire blog of the Wall Street Journal reports. Gov. Jerry Brown, in his first executive decree, is shutting off half of the 96,000 cellphone accounts paid for by the state in order to start chipping away at a massive budget deficit.

The current and former governor called it “astonishing” how many state-paid mobile phones are out there, and ordered his agency heads to collect 48,000 of them by June 1

The $20 million the move is expected to save -- assuming cancellation fees don’t eat up the savings -- is a droplet in the ocean of California’s $25 billion in red ink.