It seems like every day I read about how government wastes money so I thought I would record them. Since I began this blog, I have been stunned by the amount of waste, fraud, and mismanagement I have found. I recognize that some government is necessary for any society to exist but without the "profit incentive" that we have in private enterprise, government continues to grow like a cancer and along with it the potential for abuse. If you ever needed a reason to limit government, just read some of the following posts.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Many disability recipients admit they could work

Recipients of federal disability checks often admit that they are capable of working but cannot or will not find a job, that those closest to them tell them they should be working, and that working to get off the disability rolls is not among their goals.

More baffling, most have never received significant medical treatment and not seen a doctor about their condition in the last year, even though medical problems are the official reason they don't work. Those who acknowledge they're on disability because they can't find a job say they make little effort to find one.

Unearned disability, called SSI, is for individuals who have petitioned to be classified as disabled. Many of them have never worked and have never paid into Social Security. Earned disability, or SSDI, is for those who have held jobs for significant periods of time and paid at least partially into Social Security before becoming disabled.

In 2009, the Social Security Administration conducted a detailed study of disability recipients' characteristics, desire to work and their impediments from doing so. The survey included responses from 2,300 disability benefits recipients. There are approximately 11 million SSDI recipients and approximately seven million SSI recipients.

Among the most notable results of the survey:
  • Returning to work is not a goal for 71 percent of the SSDI recipients, 60 percent of the SSI recipients.
  • 75 percent of the SSDI recipients don't see themselves returning to work within five years, 65 percent of the SSI recipients don't.
  • 72 percent of the small number of SSDI recipients who started a job while on disability got cash under the table, as did 70 percent of the small number of SSI recipients who started a job while on disability.
  • 24 percent of the SSDI recipients lack even GEDs, as do 43 percent of the SSI recipients.
Unlike welfare, disability isn't term-limited, and in some cases it's become permanent unemployment insurance for the unemployable.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

$30 Million To Dead Farmers

The Government Accountability Office estimated in a new report that agencies within the Agriculture Department may have paid more than $30 million to thousands of deceased recipients between 2008 and 2012. The report found that at the Risk Management Agency, which deals with crop insurance, a review of payments showed $22 million may have gone to more than 3,400 individuals "two or more years after death". The report also looked at payments from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and found $10.6 million went to 1,103 "deceased individuals one year or more after their death"

The GAO report faulted the agency for not using a Social Security Administration master list to verify whether policyholders have died. The report praised another agency, the Farm Service Agency (which helps with disaster assistance and other programs) for aggressively checking payment records against death records. The report said the FSA has, by doing this, found it made $3.3 million in improper payments to thousands of dead people, and has so far recovered $1 million of that.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Only in America...

Supposedly, this is Canada's Top Ten List of America’s Stupidity:

10) Only in America … could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000 a plate campaign fund-raising event.

9) Only in America … could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black while only 14% of the population is black. Additionally, 40+% of all federal entitlements goes to black Americans (3 times the rate that go to whites and 5 times the rate that go to Hispanics).

8) Only in America … could they have had the two people most responsible for their tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats, who are in favor of higher taxes.

7) Only in America … can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.

6) Only in America … would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege while they discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just ‘magically’ become American citizens.

5) Only in America … could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country’s Constitution be thought of as “extremists.”

4) Only in America … could you need to present a driver’s license to cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.

3) Only in America … could people demand the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. oil company (Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).

2) Only in America … could the government collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it has per year (total spending of $7 Million PER MINUTE) and complain that it doesn’t have nearly enough money.

1) Only in America … could the rich people – who pay 86% of all income taxes – be accused of not paying their “fair share” by people who don’t pay any income taxes at all.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The Terror-Fighting Boondoggle

An armored personnel carrier bought by a sheriff’s office in Washington state with anti-terrorism dollars was used to pull over a suspected drunk driver. A $21 fish tank, a hog catcher and a $24,000 “latrine on wheels” were purchased with homeland security funds in Texas. A counter-terrorism summit was held on an island resort.

Those are just a few of the examples of wasteful, misguided or questionable spending in the name of protecting and preparing the nation for potential terrorist attacks highlighted in a report released by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

The yearlong inquiry into homeland security grants hammers the Urban Area Security Initiative, one of the many programs available to state and local governments for equipment and training that ostensibly is designed to enhance preparedness. The 55-page report concludes that the initiative, tasked with bolstering the defenses and response efforts of U.S. cities, has difficulty demonstrating that such spending has made the nation safer from terrorism and catastrophe. “We cannot secure liberty and guarantee security simply by spending more and more money in the name of security,” the report says.

Coburn’s report focuses on the $7.1 billion security program, launched in 2003 to benefit seven major American cities, including New York and Los Angeles, considered top terrorist targets. The grant funds are administered and disbursed by the Department of Homeland Security. Other cities cried foul, and politics began to overshadow more practical spending decisions. Lawmakers who represented less-populated areas of the country demanded their own slice of the pie, and the program ballooned to more than 60 cities, including some seemingly far off a terrorist’s map of targets. Purchases challenged in the report include:

  • Police in Clovis, CA deployed their armored BearCat truck, which typically costs about $250,000, for an Easter egg hunt, while a sheriff in New York state showcased his similar tank-like vehicle in 10 parades over the course of a year.
  • Authorities in Columbus, Ohio, used $98,000 in grant funds to purchase an “underwater robot.”
  • Two drones purchased by Seattle police with $80,000 in grant funds could not carry anything heavier than 2 pounds, could not be flown above 400 feet and had a battery life under 10 minutes.

Overall, the federal government has sent $35 billion in grants to state and local authorities over the past decade by expanding existing programs or creating new ones after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Homeland Security Department has faced repeated criticism from government watchdogs, news reports and budget hawks that it has done a poor job tracking and justifying the anti-terrorism spending.

Department spokesman Matt Chandler said officials there fundamentally disagree with the report’s take on the value of homeland security grants. “We have seen the value of these grants time and again… FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is committed to being responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars and ensuring that all federal grant dollars that we disburse are used as intended – to strengthen our resilience against all hazards and make our communities safer places to live.” Chandler said the department has learned from lessons over the past 10 years, and the Obama administration has proposed a new vision for grants in its fiscal year 2013 budget.

Coburn's report illustrates serious problems in how anti-terrorism funds have been spent by also calling attention to some of the more eyebrow-raising purchases agencies nationwide have made with federal money. The senator signals his views starting with the tongue-in-cheek cover of the report and its array of children's toys on Capitol Hill. With the U.S. Capitol dome looming in the background, a toy helicopter swoops overhead while two police-type Lego vehicles patrol in the foreground. The wily Star Wars robot R2-D2 wheels past.

A Center for Investigative Reporting examination last year found that civilian police departments and other agencies have gone on a buying spree since 9/11, scooping up military-style equipment that has transformed them into forces resembling small armies. The probe was one of numerous in-depth stories by CIR in recent years exploring the surge in counterterrorism and preparedness spending nationwide.

The Homeland Security Department provided little oversight of state and local governments as they spent federal money, the Coburn report finds. Local officials emphasized worst-case scenarios in grant applications to improve their chances of winning grants, the report adds, which has cultivated an attitude that it’s more important to spend than spend well. The mayor of Escondido, Calif., last year said he wouldn’t have approved local dollars being used for a $250,000 BearCat, but it was OK since federal taxpayer funds were involved.

Coburn’s office concluded that both the Homeland Security Department and Congress have failed to establish ways to measure how federal spending made the nation better-protected, or even how much money should be spent by the federal government on state and local anti-terrorism efforts.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of the Homeland Security Department, has spent $25 million trying to develop a method for measuring the effectiveness of homeland security grants, but three attempts so far have failed. “It is unclear why FEMA continues to have difficulty in doing so considering the experience and expertise of the private sector that is available to inform FEMA’s own efforts,” the report stated.

Ohio State University political science professor John Mueller has closely studied homeland security spending and said government officials should do a better job weighing risks and judging how to mitigate them before making big purchases. “If you’re spending a lot of money dealing with something that’s bad and extremely unlikely, and you’re not spending it on something like an ambulance, which you can use every day and is needed every day, then that’s a bad expenditure,” Mueller said.

Among other things, the report recommends that officials prioritize the most significant risks, implement a systematic approach to measuring preparedness and determine whether it’s being achieved efficiently.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Another Waste List

Even though our politicians insist that there is very little that can still be cut out of the budget, the truth is that the federal budget is absolutely drowning in pork. Here is a list of some of the ways that the U.S. government is wasting your hard-earned money...
  1. The IRS is about to pay out 70 million dollars in bonuses to employees even though discretionary bonuses are supposed to be cancelled due to the sequester.
  2. According to the Washington Post, the U.S. government is going to leave 7 billion dollars worth of military equipment behind in Afghanistan.
  3. It is being projected that the trip that the Obamas made to Africa will cost U.S. taxpayers $100,000,000.
  4. The NIH plans to spend $509,840 on a study that "will send text messages in 'gay lingo' to methamphetamine addicts to try to persuade them to use fewer drugs and more condoms."
  5. The National Science Foundation has given $384,949 to Yale University to do a study on “Sexual Conflict, Social Behavior and the Evolution of Waterfowl Genitalia”.  Try not to laugh, but much of this research involves examining and measuring the reproductive organs of male ducks.
  6. The IRS spent $60,000 on a film parody of “Star Trek” and a film parody of “Gilligan’s Island”.  Internal Revenue Service employees were the actors in the two parodies, so as you can imagine the acting was really bad.
  7. The NIH has given $1.5 million to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts to study why “three-quarters” of lesbians in the United States are overweight and why most gay males are not.
  8. The NIH has also spent $2.7 million to study why lesbians have more “vulnerability to hazardous drinking”.
  9. During 2012, the salaries of Barack Obama’s three climate change advisers combined came to a grand total of more than $370,000.
  10. Overall, 139 different White House staffers were making at least $100,000 during 2012, and there were 20 staffers that made the maximum of $172,200.
  11. Amazingly, U.S. taxpayers spend more than 1.4 billion dollars a year on the Obamas.  Meanwhile, British taxpayers only spend about 58 million dollars on the entire royal family.
  12. During 2012, $25,000 of federal money was spent on a promotional tour for the Alabama Watermelon Queen.
  13. The U.S. government spent $505,000 “to promote specialty hair and beauty products for cats and dogs” in 2012.
  14. NASA spends close to a million dollars a year developing a menu of food for a manned mission to Mars even though it is being projected that a manned mission to Mars is still decades away.
  15. During 2012, the federal government spent 15 million dollars to help the Russians recruit nuclear scientists.
  16. Over the past 15 years, a total of approximately $5.25 million has been spent on hair care services for the U.S. Senate.
  17. The U.S. government spent 27 million dollars to teach Moroccans how to design and make pottery in 2012.
  18. At a time when we have an epidemic of unemployment in the United States, the U.S. Department of Education is spending$1.3 million to “reduce linguistic, academic, and employment barriers for skilled and low-skilled immigrants and refugees, and to integrate them into the U.S. workforce and professions.”
  19. The federal government still sends about 20 million dollars a year to the surviving family members of veterans of World War I, even though World War I ended 94 years ago.
  20. The U.S. government is spending approximately 3.6 million dollars a year to support the lavish lifestyles of former presidents such as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton even though they make millions of dollars in speaking fees.
  21. During fiscal 2012, the National Science Foundation gave researchers at Purdue University $350,000.  They used part of that money to help fund a study that discovered that if golfers imagine that a hole is bigger it will help them with their putting.
  22. The U.S. government is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority every single year.
  23. Federal agencies have purchased a total of approximately 2 billion rounds of ammunition over the past couple of years.  It is claimed that all of this ammunition is needed for “training purposes”.
  24. During 2012, the National Science Foundation spent $516,000 on the creation of a video game called “Prom Week” which apparently simulates “all the social interactions of the event.
  25. If you can believe it, $10,000 of U.S. taxpayer money was actually used to purchase talking urinal cakes up in Michigan.
  26. When Joe Biden and his staff took a trip to London, the hotel bill cost U.S. taxpayers $459,388.65.
  27. Joe Biden and his staff also stopped in Paris for one night.  The hotel bill for that one night came to $585,000.50.
  28. Close to 15,000 retired federal employees are currently collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually.  That list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.
  29. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent $300,000 to encourage Americans to eat caviar.
  30. The National Institutes of Health recently gave $666,905 to a group of researchers that is conducting a study on the benefits of watching reruns on television.
  31. The National Science Foundation has given 1.2 million dollars to a team of “scientists” that is spending part of that money on a study that is seeking to determine whether elderly Americans would benefit from playing World of Warcraft or not.
  32. The National Institutes of Health recently gave $548,731 to a team of researchers that concluded that those that drink heavily in their thirties also tend to feel more immature.
  33. The National Science Foundation recently spent $30,000 on a study to determine if “gaydar” actually exists.  This is the conclusion that the researchers reached at the end of the study… “Gaydar is indeed real and… its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features”.
  34. In 2011, the National Institutes of Health spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
  35. The National Institutes of Health has spent more than 5 million dollars on a website called Sexpulse that is targeted at “men who use the Internet to seek sex with men”.  According to Fox News, the website “includes pornographic images of homosexual sex as well as naked and scantily clad men” and features “a Space Invaders-style interactive game that uses a penis-shaped blaster to shoot down gay epithets.”
  36. The General Services Administration spent $822,751 on a “training conference” for 300 west coast employees at the M Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.  The following is how the Washington Post described some of the wasteful expenses that happened during this “conference”… Among the “excessive, wasteful and in some cases impermissable” spending the inspector general documented: $5,600 for three semi-private catered in-room parties and $44 per person daily breakfasts; $75,000 for a “team-building” exercise — the goal was to build a bicycle; $146,000 on catered food and drinks; and $6,325 on commemorative coins in velvet boxes to reward all participants for their work on stimulus projects. The $31,208 “networking” reception featured a $19-per-person artisanal cheese display and $7,000 of sushi. At the conference’s closing-night dinner, employees received “yearbooks” with their pictures, at a cost of $8,130. You can see some stunning pictures of GSA employees living the high life in Las Vegas right here.
  37. Do you remember when credit rating agency Egan Jones downgraded U.S. government debt from AA+ to AA?  Well, someone in the federal government apparently did not like that at all.  According to Zero Hedge, the SEC planned to file charges against Egan Jones for “misstatements” on a regulatory application with the SEC. Normally, the SEC does not go after anyone.  After all, when is the last time a major banker went to prison? No, the truth is that the SEC is usually just a huge waste of taxpayer money.  According to ABC News, one investigation found that 17 senior SEC officials had been regularly viewing pornography while at work.  While the American people were paying their salaries, this is what senior SEC officials were busy doing… "One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn, according to the report, which has yet to be released. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices. An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive. Another SEC accountant used his SEC-issued computer to upload his own sexually explicit videos onto porn websites he joined. And another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month."
  38. According to InformationWeek, the federal government is spending “millions of dollars” to train Asian call center workers.
  39. If you can believe it, the federal government has actually spent $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
  40. The U.S. Agency for International Development spent 10 million dollars to create a version of “Sesame Street” for Pakistani television.
  41. The Obama administration has plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars to help students from Indonesia get master’s degrees.
  42. The National Science Foundation spent $198,000 on a University of California-Riverside study that explored “motivations, expectations and goal pursuit in social media.” One of the questions the study sought an answer to was the following: “Do unhappy people spend more time on Twitter or Facebook?”
  43. In 2011, $147,138 was given to the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan.  Their best magic trick is making U.S. taxpayer dollars disappear.
  44. The federal government recently spent $74,000 to help Michigan “increase awareness about the role Michigan plays in the production of trees and poinsettias.”
  45. In 2011, the federal government gave $550,000 toward the making of a documentary about how rock and roll contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.
  46. The National Institutes of Health has contributed $55,382 toward a study of “hookah smoking habits” in the country of Jordan.
  47. The federal government gave $606,000 to researchers at Columbia University to study how heterosexuals use the Internet to find love.
  48. A total of $133,277 was recently given to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games for video game preservation.  The International Center for the History of Electronic Games says that it “collects, studies, and interprets video games, other electronic games, and related materials and the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography.”
  49. The federal government has given approximately $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their "research" into video games such as World of Warcraft.
  50. In 2011, the National Science Foundation gave one team of researchers $149,990 to create a video game called “RapidGuppy” for cell phones and other mobile devices.
  51. In 2011, $936,818 was spent developing an online soap opera entitled “Diary of a Single Mom”.  The show “chronicles the lives and challenges of three single mothers and their families trying to get ahead despite obstacles that all single mothers face, such as childcare, healthcare, education, and finances.”
  52. Last year, the federal government spent $96,000 to buy iPads for kindergarten students in Maine.
  53. The U.S. Postal Service once spent $13,500 for a single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
  54. In 2011, the Air Force Academy completed work on an outdoor worship area for pagans and Wiccans. The worship area consists of “a small Stonehenge-like circle of boulders with [a] propane fire pit” and it cost $51,474 to build. The worship area is “for the handful of current or future cadets whose religions fall under the broad category of ‘Earth-based’, which includes Wiccans, druids and pagans.” At this point, that only includes 3 current students at the Air Force Academy.
  55. The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers $400,000 to study why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.
  56. The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
  57. The National Institutes of Health once spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.
  58. The National Science Foundation recently spent $200,000 on a study that examined how voters react when politicians change their stances on climate change.
  59. The federal government recently spent $484,000 to help build a Mellow Mushroom pizzeria in Arlington, Texas.
  60. At this point, China is holding over a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt.  But that didn’t stop the United States from sending 17.8 million dollars in foreign aid to China in 2011.
  61. The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the largest snack food maker in the world (PepsiCo Inc.) a total of 1.3 million dollars in corporate welfare that was used to help build "a Greek yogurt factory in New York."
  62. The National Science Foundation recently gave a whopping $697,177 to a New York City-based theater company to produce a musical about climate change.
  63. The federal government once shelled out $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.
  64. The U.S. Department of Agriculture once handed researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
  65. The federal government has spent $175,587 "to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior".

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

State Department spent $630,000 on Facebook 'likes'

State Department officials spent $630,000 to get more Facebook "likes", prompting employees to complain to a government watchdog that the bureau was "buying fans" in social media, the agency's inspector general says. "Many in the bureau criticize the advertising campaigns as 'buying fans' who may have once clicked on an ad or 'liked' a photo but have no real interest in the topic and have never engaged further," the inspector general reported.

Despite the surge in likes, the IG said the effort failed to reach the bureau's target audience, which is largely older and more influential than the people liking its pages. Only about 2 percent of fans actually engage with the pages by liking, sharing or commenting.

In September 2012 Facebook also changed its approach to users' news feeds, and the expensive "fan" campaigns became much less valuable. The bureau now must constantly pay for sponsored ads to keep its content visible even to people who have already liked its pages.

Not only does the bureau lack its own social media strategy, but various State Department bureaus have more than 150 social media accounts that are uncoordinated and often overlap, according to the IG.