Government waste runs into the tens of billions of dollars annually. Here are just four areas of government waste.
It’s Black Friday, and with it comes massive U.S. consumer spending. Overall, consumers spend about $380 per person the day after Thanksgiving. It’s easy to laugh when we see people spending money on ridiculous gifts like electric bug vacuums, but the amount spent on often-silly Christmas gifts pales in comparison to money wasted on government projects every day of the year.
The government wasted an estimated $125 billion in 2014, and here are just a few of the ways it used our taxpayer dollars.
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The FBI Needs a New I.T. Guy
The FBI’s new case filing system, Sentinel, was supposed to cost $425 million. That already sounds like a lot to pay for an IT system, but here’s the catch: It cost $100 million more than the initial budget and it doesn’t even work.
Multiple audits found system-wide failures, and a recent report from the Inspector General’s office found that it actually made it more difficult for agents to properly do their jobs.
IG officials said they were told by agents that:
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Government Contractors Throw Million Dollar “Training Retreats”
International Relief and Development collected billions of dollars from the government to help rebuild impoverished and war-torn countries around the world. At the same time, the company also billed over a million dollars to the government for retreats and parties at lavish resorts.
The company listed these retreats and parties as “training” and “staff morale” when billing the government. Apparently, that entailed:
- Extreme driving classes at the Jeep Off-Road Driving Academy
- Skeet shooting outings
- Free iPods
- $50 gift certificates
- Open bars
Team-building and morale development are important, but this seems a bit excessive.
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U.S. Military Builds “Melting Walls”
“Melting Walls” is not the name of some conceptual modern art piece, but instead the sad reality of government appropriations. The military paid a contractor in Afghanistan $500,000 to build a dry fire range for the Afghan Special Police to use for training exercises.
Lack of quality control meant the buildings were constructed with bricks made mostly of sand, which, it turns out, doesn’t hold up so well in the rain. Within four months, the walls began to disintegrate, and eventually they had to be torn down and completely rebuilt.
According to the Rep. Steve Russell (R- Okla.) report, “Waste Watch,” the company remains eligible to conduct more taxpayer-funded projects.
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$5,500 Dollar Wi-Fi
Some government programs seem well intentioned, but just end up being completely inefficient. Take the Rural Utilities Service, which provides funding for utilities such as phones and Internet in underserved areas. That’s a great goal, but at a certain point you have to wonder if all the money pumped into the program is really worth the meager results.
Getting rid of the Rural Utilities Service would save $9.6 billion a year. That’s because it funds wildly inefficient programs like one that provided broadband for an Arkansas town of 122 residents at a cost of $5,500 a person.
These, unfortunately, aren’t the only examples that prove that the government tends to go on massive spending sprees. Click here to learn why government spending has gotten out of hand.
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