The United States Federal Government is the greatest waste machineever created in the history of the world. As the government has grown, the waste, fraud and abuse has grown along with it.
The Federal government is filled with what I like to call “institutional waste”. It’s all of the waste that is created by Congress and the Executive branch in the course of creating programs and budgeting for them.
Hundreds of billions are spent on programs that duplicate other programs. We have something like 47 different programs for job training, 44 of which overlap.
It’s like the app store. Are you a native American? Well, we have a training program for you. Are you Hispanic-American? We have a training program for you. And so on, through 47 different programs and something like $18 billion.
The GAO’s found that five DoD departments, eight DoD agencies and more than 24 DoD presidential appointees all oversee bioterrorism prevention at a cost of $6.48 billion. I’m sure that we could use the money for a better purpose, like paying down Obama’s wild spending spree over the last 3 1/2 years.
There are five agencies or offices working to ensure that the federal government uses less gas. How hard is that? Just ground all of the chartered jets that various members of Congress or the Executive use. That should solve the problem.
There are 15 federal agencies that handle food safety, costing a total of $1.6 billion, which is way more than it costs me to sniff my milk carton.
There are 20 federal offices or programs devoted to homelessness, totaling $2.9 billion. Even using the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s generous 2008 estimate of the size of the U.S. homeless population, there are at most 2.2 million homeless people in the United States in a given year.
That means that the taxpayers spend about $13,000 a year on every homeless man, woman and child — and that’s not including the cost of food stamps, welfare or subsidized public housing.
In a long ago era (maybe 30-40 years ago), the American publican was outraged by $900 hammers and special toilets for B-52 bombers. Today, we’ve become somewhat jaded. It was recently reported that the USDA spent $2 million to recruit one intern.
In a recent Inspector General’s report by the department it reported the following, “Expenditures for FY 2010 and 2011 included over $686,000 for development and implementation of a networking website and approximately $192,500 in housing costs for two summers.”
“OCIO (Office of the Chief Information Officer) funded an intern program for a total of $2 million which, while funded as a security enhancement project, only resulted in one intern being hired full-time for ASOC [Agriculture Security Operations Center],” the report reads.
Like I said at the beginning of the post, the Federal government is the greatest waste machine in the history of the world. Like they say ion Texas about everything being bigger, in the U.S. everything is bigger even the waste, fraud and abuse.
Richard Billies is founder and purveyor of WasteFraudAndAbuse.org and a frequent contributor to the SNSPost. The opinions expressed in this article are those of Mr. Billies and not necessarily those of the SNSPost or its staff.
