Bloomberg has a detailed article on how private contractors routinely rip off the government for billions. Ironically, the budget-Nazis are not wrong about wasteful government spending; they are just being penny-wise and pound-foolish in obsessing about entitlements and earmarks: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aYYHKPn4DOe8 ---------------------------------------------------------snip As the federal government's $700 billion bailout of banks sputters, there's an object lesson for the new administration of President Barack Obama: Federal departments, including Treasury itself, routinely squander tens of billions of dollars a year in taxpayer money as they farm out public business to private corporations.
Obama, like presidents before him, said during his bid for the White House that he wanted to curtail waste in government. With contracting, he faces a mismanaged system that accounts for almost 40 cents of every federal dollar spent outside of mandatory obligations such as Social Security and Medicare. Not Earmarks When compared with all federal contracting, just a fraction of U.S. spending waste comes from so-called earmarks, which elected officials often criticize as the unnecessary pet projects of politicians. The "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska, for example, had a price tag of $398 million. By contrast, the government spent $368.4 billion on all contracts in 2008, and Republican Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn estimates that about $100 billion of that was wasted. U.S. spending on 3.7 million contracts in 2008 represented an increase of 76 percent over 2000 levels. "We have a broken, broken system that rewards incompetence," says Coburn, 60, who has been examining purchasing breakdowns since his election to Congress in 2005. "We need to totally change contracting." Bureaucrats, not elected officials, run the U.S. purchasing system, well out of public sight. And their bosses keep the spending secret by not releasing complete contract files to the public. No Access Just as taxpayers can't find out how the Treasury and the Federal Reserve used the first half of the bank bailout, Americans are often denied access to public records that provide details on how hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are spent in contracts. Bloomberg News filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department and the Fed asking for documents on the bailout and routine contracts. As of Jan. 12, seven months after receiving the first request, the three agencies had provided incomplete documents with blacked-out words or nothing at all. -raghu. -- Q: What did the apple say to the orange? A: Nothing, apples don't talk. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
