Cost to Taxpayers for Michelle Obama’s Family Trip to Africa

Charges for the Aircraft and Crew Alone Amount to $424,142.

Judicial Watch, the organization that investigates and fights government corruption, announced today that it has obtained mission expense records and passenger manifests from the United States Air Force related to the June 21-27, 2011, trip taken by First Lady Michelle Obama, her family and her staff to South Africa and Botswana. Judicial Watch obtained the documents pursuant to an August 19, 2011, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Air Force (No. 11-1496)). Judicial Watch is investigating the purpose and itinerary of the trip as well as a breakdown of the costs to taxpayers.

On June 28, 2011, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request seeking the mission taskings, transportation records, and passenger manifests for Michelle Obama’s Africa trip. Documents were only provided after Judicial Watch filed suit:

• According to U.S. Department of Defense’s published hourly rates for the C-32A aircraft used for the trip, Judicial Watch calculated the total cost to American taxpayers was $424,142 for use of the aircraft (34.8 flight hours x $12,188 per hour). (The C-32 is a specially configured military version of the Boeing 757.) Other expenses – meals (off the plane), transportation, security, various services, etc. – have yet to be disclosed.
• The passenger manifests confirm the presence of Obama’s daughter’s, Malia and Sasha on the trip. The two girls are listed as “Senior Staff.” The manifests also list Mrs. Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, and niece and nephew, Leslie and Avery Robinson, as well Mrs. Obama’s makeup and hairstylist (Carl Ray and Johnny Wright).
• The expense records also show $928.44 was spent for “bulk food” purchases on flight. Overall, during the trip, 192 meals were served for the 21 passengers on board.

“This trip was as much an opportunity for the Obama family to go on a safari as it was a trip to conduct government business,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This junket wasted tax dollars and the resources of our overextended military. No wonder we had to sue to pry loose this information.”

Senate Barbershop Loses $350,000 Per Year

The Senate barbershop -- which opened in 1859 -- provides government subsidized haircuts, shaves and shoe shines to the political elite (most senators are multi-millionaires). Over the the past fifteen years, it has cost taxpayers over five million dollars. Last year the salon needed a $300,000 bailout from the Senate coffers to cover its costs (the head barber earns ~$80,000/year -- well above the annual income $28,050 of average U.S. barbers). 

On Tuesday, the Senate barbershop’s deficit problems became a late night punch line, as comedian Jay Leno spun a positive perspective on the salon’s monetary losses: “The United States Senate is now fighting to keep open the Senate barbershop...it loses $350,000 a year,” Leno said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “You know what that makes it? The most successful government program ever!”

By the way, the House of Representatives has its own barbershop as well, known as the Capitol Barber. However, after being privatized in the mid 90s, the House barbershop is no longer funded by taxpayers.

County supervisor will receive $400,000+/year pension

Alameda County Administrator Susan Muranishi will retire with an annual pension of $423,644 a year... for the rest of her life. According to county pay records, in addition to her $301,000 base salary, Muranishi receives:

• $24,000, plus change, in “equity pay’’ to guarantee that she makes at least 10 percent more than anyone else in the county
• About $54,000 a year in “longevity” pay for having stayed with the county for more than 30 years.
• An annual performance bonus of $24,000.
• And another $9,000 a year for serving on the county’s three-member Surplus Property Authority, an ad hoc committee of the Board of Supervisors that oversees the sale of excess land.

Like other county executives, Muranishi also gets an $8,292-a-year car allowance. She also has a separate executive private pension plan, for which the county chips in $46,500 a year.  No wonder municipalities and state governments around the country are going bankrupt.

Government Spends More on Disability than Food Stamps, Welfare Combined

In an eye-opening six-month investigation into America’s disability program, Planet Money reporter Chana Joffe-Walt uncovered a “disability industrial complex” fraught with fraud that churns out 14 million checks every month to citizens the government has deemed disabled.

“Since the economy began its slow, slow recovery in late 2009, we’ve been averaging about 150,000 jobs created per month,” said Joffe-Walt in an Public Radio International (PRI) “This American Life” interview. “In that same period every month, almost 250,000 people have been applying for disability.”

Among Joffe-Walt’s findings are the following facts:

• The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it does on food stamps and welfare combined; America’s two largest disability programs, including health care for disabled workers, costs taxpayers $260 billion a year
• In some parts of the country, such as Hale County, Alabama, one out of every four working-age adults collects a disability check
• As of 2011, 33.8% of newly diagnosed disabled workers cited “back pain and other musculoskeletal problems” as their reason for being unable to work.  In 1961, the top reason for being disabled was “heart disease, stroke”
• Disabled workers do not get counted in the unemployment figures. If they did, the numbers would be far higher
• Less than 1% of people who went on disability at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce
• The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program—which covers kids and adults—has exploded.  SSI is now seven times larger than it was 30 years ago.

The report suggests that the much-touted Welfare to Work policies of the 1990s that appeared to successfully move welfare recipients off the public dole may have been a mirage. States have figured out that shifting people from welfare to disability frees up substantial funds, as states have to pay the costs of welfare, but the federal government picks up the tab for disability.

“That’s a kind of ugly secret of the American labor market,” said MIT economist David Autor.  “Part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low, until recently, is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program.”

Joffe-Walt says disability has “become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills.” The reporter notes that the disability program “wasn’t supposed to serve this purpose; it’s not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet.”

According to Social Security chief actuary Steve Goss, disability insurance program reserves will run out of money in 2016.

Addendum (3/28/2013): Seth S sent me this link which complements the above post.

$585,000 for one-night stay in Paris

Recent documents posted to a government website give a rare glimpse of what it costs to send our politicians overseas. Official business took Vice President Joe Biden to Europe, a trip that included a bill of $585,000 for his one-night stay in Paris. Also on the receipt was $321,665 for a limousine company and $459,338.65 for a hotel stay in London. According to several officials from previous administrations, this is just what it costs to run a full-scale, overseas trip for someone like the president or the vice president. Click here for additional information.

Rotten Tomatoes for a Billion-Dollar Farm Payout

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on the USDA plan to award at least $1.3 billion to women and Hispanics who were not offered subsidized farm loans that they applied for, or said later they would have liked to apply for, from 1981 to 2000.

Some excerpts:

• The current standard for women and Hispanics is more rigorous than the one used during the rounds of settlements—the last one ended in 2010—to award billions of dollars to blacks who claimed to be victims of USDA discrimination between 1981 and 1996. In those cases, black claimants' simple assertion that they had attempted to farm or had applied unsuccessfully for a farm loan was sometimes sufficient to collect a large payout. In December, the Government Accountability Office noted that most of the black applicants' claims had been "evaluated based solely on the information submitted by the claimants and, as a result, the adjudicator of these claims has no way of independently verifying that information."

• The Government Accountability Office has estimated that a quarter of bankruptcies among USDA's farm borrowers in the 1980s occurred because farmers received too many subsidized loans. Almost half of such borrowers were delinquent in the mid-1990s, and the agency wrote off $15 billion in bad farm loans between 1989 and 1996. A 2006 USDA study found that half of the subsidized farm loans granted in 2000 had defaulted at least once by 2004, and that vast numbers of loan recipients simply gave up farming. It is hard to understand how government wronged anyone by not providing the financial steroids that would have led many to ruin.

• The real problem with federal farm loans is that they are prejudiced against common sense and sound business practices. There is no shortage of commercial loans nowadays for competent, credit-worthy farmers. USDA loan programs exist solely to let Congress steer capital to politically favored applicants. The fact that the loans often leave recipients worse off is irrelevant as long as congressmen reap campaign contributions and votes from many beneficiaries.

TSA New Uniforms - $50 Million

While Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano threatens to furlough thousands of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) guards that will supposedly cause long lines at airports, it seems the TSA is ready and able to spend $50 million on new uniforms. That’s right. Two days before the sequester began, the TSA announced it has just awarded a $50 million one-year contract to purchase uniforms for airport screeners.

The lucky contract winner is VF Imagewear, which owns the Lee Brand and Wrangler Hero. What does the TSA get for the $1,000 cost per employee? Well, their initial uniform set is “3 long-sleeved shirts, 3 short-sleeved shirts, 2 pairs of trousers, 2 ties, and one belt, sweater, socks, and jacket.”  However, if you go online to check what Wrangler charges for each item, you would find that the “Hero cargo pants are $19.50, a Hero jacket is $19.99, Hero shirts are $10.99.”  Add up the costs of a belt, socks, trousers, shirts, and so on and you come up with a total price of $186 for the set, some $814 less than what the government (taxpayers) is paying. The final insult is that some of the uniform will be manufactured in Mexico.

Obscene Government Waste

Here's a link to an interesting article by Alan Caruba. Some excerpts:

• The government spends $1.7 billion for maintenance on empty buildings it owns, although some sources put the figure at closer to $25 billion. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that 55,000 properties are underutilized or entirely vacant.
• The federal government owns approximately one-third of all U.S. land. It does not need more land and it could be argued that it should not own 80% of Nevada and Alaska, and more than half of Idaho. That said, it wants to spend $2.3 billion to purchase more land and the National park Service currently has a backlog of maintenance tasks totaling $5 billion. These include parks that the Obama administration was saying would all have to be closed down because of a sequester reduction of a mere 1.2% of all federal spending.
• Homeland Security’s Janet Napolitano was issuing statements about the sequestration cuts to her department, but according to Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, the department has $9 billion in unspent preparedness funds. How much of that will be spent on purchasing more DHS ammunition? They have already purchased enough to shoot every American five times.
• Republican lawmakers in Congress took the sequester fear-mongering as an opportunity to note, as Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) said, “There are pots of money sitting in different departments across the federal government, that have been authorized over either a number of months or years.”
• Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is a leading budget hawk who identified programs to fund a space ship to another solar system, funds for advancements in beef jerky from France, and $6 billion for research to find out what lessons about democracy and decision-making can be learned—from fish!
• While you’re trying to figure out how to pay your 2012 taxes, give a thought to the National Science Foundation $350,000 grant to Perdue University researchers on how to improve your golf game.
• Not to be outspent, the National Institutes of Health gave a $940,000 grant to researchers who found that the production of pheromones in—wait for it—fruit flies, declines over time. Turns out that male fruit flies were more attracted to younger female fruit flies. The NIH also paid researchers to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they’re drunk and spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing” program on men in South Africa. You can’t make up this stuff.
• For reasons that defy sanity, various elements of the government have spent $3 million for research on video games; $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly; a whopping $500 million on a program that would, among other things, try to figure out why five-year-olds “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom; and grants such as $1.8 million on a “museum of neon signs” in Las Vegas, Nevada.
• Sanity does not apply to the $2 billion given annually to U.S. farmers to not farm their land. Don’t even ask about the Defense Department. It has long been famous for waste.

CAGW Prime Cuts Summary

The Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has released its Prime Cuts 2013. This year’s version contains 557 recommendations that would save taxpayers $580.6 billion in the first year and $1.8 trillion over five years. To date, the implementation of CAGW’s recommendations has helped save taxpayers $1.3 trillion. Prime Cuts 2013 can serve as a valuable resource for paring down a bloated federal budget. No area of government spending is spared.

The often hysterical rhetoric over sequestration has made it seem like allowing the cuts to occur will jeopardize national security and destroy the economy. However, as then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen said on September 11, 2011, “the single-biggest threat to our national security is our debt.”

By following the blueprint provided by CAGW’s Prime Cuts 2013, wasteful government spending can be cut and the nation can start on a path toward fiscal sanity. Prime Cuts 2013 is essential reading for taxpayers, the media, and legislators alike.

Postal Service overprints commemorative stamps – $2 million

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) wastes $2 million in printing and manufacturing costs annually producing commemorative stamps that must later be destroyed. Several stamps series have been printed so excessively that had every person in the nation sent a piece of mail using them, there still would have been leftovers. The IG concluded the USPS has no “objective forecasting methodology and review process” to determine demand for special stamps.

Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)

As the government continues to release more information regarding the Affordable Health Care Act (I am beginning to think this is an oxymoron), the news just keeps getting worse...

• Click here to read the 21 page draft application that Americans would use to access the health law’s subsidized insurance coverage. In order to figure out how much Americans will pay, the federal government needs to collect lots of information, everything from the size of the family to its income to whether any family members are Alaska Natives (which would make them eligible for additional services through the Indian Health Service). It’s hard to collect all that data in a way that is not a bit complex. Most Americans will probably have to pay someone to fill out the form just as they pay someone to do their taxes. By the way, you will still have to pick a health plan.

• The Joint Committee on Taxation recently released a 96 page report on the tax provisions associated with Affordable Care Act. The report describes the 21 tax increases included in Obamacare, totaling $1.058 trillion – a steep increase from initial assessment, according to the Tax Prof Blog. The summer 2012 estimate is nearly twice the $569 billion estimate produced at the time of the passage of the law in March 2010. Government programs are always more expensive than anticipated. Click here for more information.

Pentagon Paid $998,798 to Ship Two 19-Cent Washers

A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said.

The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

The owners of C&D Distributors in Lexington, South Carolina -- twin sisters -- exploited a flaw in an automated Defense Department purchasing system: bills for shipping to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled "priority'' were usually paid automatically, said Cynthia Stroot, a Pentagon investigator.

C&D and two of its officials were barred in December from receiving federal contracts. Today, a federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said.

Number of Tax-Delinquent Government Workers Up 11.5%

The number of tax-delinquent federal workers and retirees increased by 11.5 percent in 2011, according to Internal Revenue Service data. The delinquency rate rose to 3.2 percent from 2.9 percent the previous year. The 311,566 delinquent taxpayers owe a total of $3.5 billion in federal taxes, according to the IRS data released today.

The House passed a bill last year that would require the government to fire federal workers who are “seriously delinquent” in paying their taxes. The bill, sponsored by Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, passed 263- 114, and didn’t advance in the Senate.

Time For Smart Budget Cuts

Here is an excellent article by Senator Tom Coburn on how and why to cut the federal budget. Some excerpts:

• Since 2002, total federal spending has increased nearly 89% while median household income has dropped 5%
• If the federal government stopped sending unemployment checks to millionaires, it could save $14.8 million a year (according to IRS data) and prevent 5,103 furloughs
• But if cabinet secretaries insist on using furloughs, they could start by furloughing employees who already don't bother to show up for work
• Taxpayers spend $3.1 billion on 209 separate science, technology, engineering and mathematics education programs across 13 agencies

Portraits

At a time when the government is running a $16 trillion deficit and furloughing employees due to the sequestration, the Environmental Protection Agency spent nearly $40,000 on a portrait of Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, the military spent $41,200 on a painting of Air Force Secretary Michael B. Donley, and the Agriculture Department $22,500 for a 3-by-4-foot oil portrait of Secretary Thomas J. Vilsack.

Scooter Store Caught Cheating the Government Out of Millions

The Scooter Store received up to $87 million dollars in Medicare overpayments over the last several years for causing doctors to write prescriptions for these power wheelchairs that were not medically necessary.  Apparently, The Scooter Store is not alone in this activity.  Many of its competitors have behaved similarly in facilitating these types of overpayments.  Indeed, a 2011 report released by the Department of Health and Human Services said that an astounding 80 percent of power wheelchair claims did not meet Medicare’s coverage requirements. Medicare and its beneficiaries paid four times the average amount paid by suppliers for standard power wheelchairs.

Games for Change Festival - $50,000

The National Endowment for the Arts gave $50,000 to fund the 9th Annual Games for Change Festival, a conference focused on “the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts.” One featured game, Zombie Yoga, “uses Yoga and visualization to empower the player emotionally.” Another game puts players through life situations that would increase someone’s risk for HIV.

Workshops, networking, and speakers discussed how to design video games for the common good. One workshop, “Yourturn!: Designing a music game for social impact,”focused on using “social interaction and identity construction among youth minority groups in Vienna, Austria.” “Game-o-matic: A tool for generating journalistic games on the fly” helped journalists think about news “as systems rather than as stories.” Another workshop featured Deepak Chopra, a popular public speaker on spirituality who discussed his Nintendo Wii video game designed to connect people to “their own internal power to be happy.”

Though its goals are laudable, the federal funding directed to this festival would have been better spent providing direct help to the poor, such as antiretroviral drugs for many HIV patients on waiting lists for drugs from the Ryan White program