I don't really understand why this is even an issue. Fire him, sell the cards for even more money on the market, charge him for the excess electricity and recoup all the currency's worth.
Then the state will actually make money from this and no tax payer money is spent. What's the problem here?
Sell the cards?
If they are like any typical government bureaucracy, they wouldn't have a process for doing this, and it would probably cost $22,000 just to do the paperwork so they could be sold