Waste Beyond Belief
Do you remember spending
almost a million dollars in the last few years on a website devoted to
romance novels? How about that $17.5 million you spent on brothels in
Nevada? Or the $200,000 treating record industry executives to a world
tour?
No? Well, technically you didn’t spend all that money. Your government did. But it was your money the government spent.
Romance
novels and record tours are just a few among dozens of outrageous
expenditures Senator Tom Coburn has cataloged in his 2013 “Wastebook,” the latest of his annual reports to remind us just how out-of-control the federal government has become.
The entire report is worth
reading, if only for the experience of discovering example after example
of scandalous use of taxpayer dollars, each more absurd than the last,
none of which you’ve ever heard of.
For instance, the State
Department recently spent $5 million on custom crystal wine glasses for
its embassies. USAID spent $300,000 on 600 gallons of diesel in
Afghanistan--$500 per gallon, or a hundred times the going rate.
Amtrak lost $60 million last year alone providing food service on its long distance routes (some of which include complimentary wine and cheese, and offer gourmet meals subsidized by taxpayers).
And the USDA gave a
$100,000 grant to a North Carolina distillery to “explore the
feasibility” of the company making vodka out of yams--in a virtually dry
county. The Department also gave nearly $17 million to dozens of
businesses to fund the creation of products such as salsa and Bloody
Mary mix.
Senator Coburn’s Wastebook
is more than just a list of wasteful programs, however. It is a perfect
documentation of the advanced breakdown in government we see throughout
the federal bureaucracy.
In my new book, Breakout,
I describe three kinds of breakdown in government: the breakdown in
simple competence, the breakdown in common sense and defined purpose,
and the breakdown in the rule of law. We see all of them in this report.
Large parts of the
government are simply incompetent at performing the tasks they have
taken on. The Wastebook includes $11 billion worth of improper payments
the IRS made on the Earned Income Tax Credit last year alone. This is as
much as 28 percent of all its Earned Income Tax Credit payments, an
unbelievably high error rate which, as the report points out, causes the
IRS to “erroneously dish out more money in improper payments than the
entire budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of the
Interior, and the Department of Labor.”
Senator Coburn identifies more than a billion dollars a year in Pell
Grant fraud: scammers posing as students who take the money from the
government and run. Evidently the Department of Education is incapable
of stopping it.
The series of wastebooks
may be the clearest description ever published of the breakdown in
common sense and defined purpose of the federal government. This year’s
edition finds that Department of Justice employees spent more than
$626,000 last year to book travel by speaking to a live travel agent
rather than booking their trip online. That’s because the DOJ’s travel
agency charges $6.49 to book a trip over the internet, and a whopping
$31 to book one over the phone. In defiance of common sense, the
employees used the phone 40 percent of the time.
A more expensive example of
this collapse in common sense is the National Technical Information
Service. This agency charges other organs of the federal government to
provide reports which are largely available for free online. For
instance, the wastebook notes, the NTIS sells the “Public Health Service
Food Code” to other agencies for $69 a pop. Yet this document is
available at no cost over the internet. In fact, it’s the first result
when you search “Public Health Service Food Code” on Google. Senator
Coburn refers to the NTIS as the “Let Me Google That For You” of the federal government. The agency costs taxpayers $50 million.
Finally, the report illustrates the breakdown in the rule of law. In
one example, it points to $30 million intended to restore the
Mississippi coast which was instead used for unrelated pet projects. One
official allegedly directed millions of dollars worth of grants to
entities associated with his family and friends.
Similar corruption exists
on a grand scale. As of 2011, Senator Coburn notes, there were 312,000
federal employees or retirees who had failed to pay their income
taxes--$3.5 billion worth of them. More than a third of these people
(107,000) are current civilian employees (bureaucrats) who have not paid
their taxes and yet continue to be paid by the taxpayers. Evidently
these “public servants” do not feel they have to live under the law they
administer.
This is the breakdown we must overcome. Read Senator Coburn’s Wastebook to understand it. Then demand that your elected officials commit to breaking out.
Your Friend,
Newt
P.S. Autographed copies of Callista's new children's book, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and my new book, Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America’s Fate are now available in the Gingrich Productions store. Order both books today!
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