$1.2 Billion In Ammunition Slated For Destruction By Wasteful Government Policies

Pentagon Wasting Millions On Ammunition, Report Says

 

 

 

 

 

” The Pentagon plans to destroy more than $1 billion worth of ammunition although some of those bullets and missiles could still be used by troops, according to the Pentagon and congressional sources.

  It’s impossible to know what portion of the arsenal slated for destruction — valued at $1.2 billion by the Pentagon — remains viable because the Defense Department’s inventory systems can’t share data effectively, according to a Government Accountability Office report obtained by USA TODAY.

  The result: potential waste of unknown value.

” There is a huge opportunity to save millions, if not billions of dollars if the (Pentagon) can make some common-sense improvements to how it manages ammunition,” said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “Despite years of effort, the Army, Navy and Air Force still don’t have an efficient process for doing something as basic as sharing excess bullets. This Government Accountability Office (GAO) report clearly shows that our military’s antiquated systems lead to millions of dollars in wasteful ammunition purchases.”

 

Read the rest of this damning report of waste .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Greg Gutfeld Blasts Tax Day

‘Hucksters Rely On Us As Their Welfare’

 

 

 

“ See, my theory of government is really simple. It’s all about the street. Government should keep things off the street – thugs, the insane, invading armies – and keep things on the street – like cement and lamp posts. Everything else, we can handle, which is why I’m bummed that 110 days of my salary goes directly into the mouth of a blob that turns my efforts into useless poop.” “

More here

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An Amazingly Detailed Infographic Of Where Your 2014 Tax Money Will Go

Do You Know Where Your 2014 Taxes Will Go? Well, Here’s An Amazing Infographic Which Breaks It Out Beautifully

 

 

Click To Enlarge

By jess. Explore more visuals like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

HT/Against Crony Capitalism

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Saturday Steyn

Dublin On Two-And-A-Half Million Dollars A Day

 

”  A couple of weeks back, I remarked on the cost of President Obama’s day-trip to Brussels, accompanied by 900 flunkeys and a 45-car motorcade. In fairness to Obama, the President is a public official of the Government of the United States: I do believe he’s even mentioned in the Constitution. You will search that document in vain for any mention of the office of “First Lady” or “First Offspring”. Nevertheless:

  The documents reveal that taxpayers spent a total of at least $7,921,638.66 on the first lady’s trip. She departed for the Dublin tour on Air Force Two after accompanying the president on a meeting with Northern Ireland youth.

  So “Air Force Two” has to be on hand to get Mrs Obama, Sasha and Malia the one hundred miles from Belfast to Dublin. For the purposes of comparison, flying the entire Royal Family around for a year costs taxpayers £3,101,771 (that’s the Queen, princes, dukes, the lot). Three million quid plus change works out to about $5,194,347.37. In other words, for the cost of two days in Dublin with three members of the Obama family you can keep the entire House of Windsor in the air for a year.”

As usual , do yourself a favor and read it all

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From The “Let ’em Eat Cake” Department: Obama Ireland Visit Tab – $8 Million

Michelle Obama Riverdances Through Dublin, Helps Rack Up $7,921,638.66 Vacation Tab For Taxpayers

” When it comes to tracking the cost of Obama family vacations there are two primary challenges.  First, the Obamas are prolific jet-setters, so there are many details to track. And second, the Obama administration, clearly embarrassed by these lavish and frequent family vacations, stonewalls the release of records at every turn.

  But we have been relentless in pursuit of this information. Our attorneys file the lawsuits and make our case, and our investigators pour through pages of records and crunch the numbers. And the information we’ve uncovered – information that would otherwise remain under lock and key – shows that the Obamas have a disturbing lack of regard for taxpayer resources.

  Most recently, when reviewing the Obama family travel log, Judicial Watch recently obtained records from the U.S. Department of the Air Force and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security revealing that President Obama’s June 2013 trip to Belfast, Ireland, including a Dublin sightseeing side trip by Michelle Obama, her daughters, and her entourage, cost the taxpayers $7,921,638.66. (Per usual, and owing to the enormous public interest in Michelle Obama’s luxury travel, our discovery earned quite a bit of press coverage.)

Here’s the breakdown from the two agencies.

•  According to the Department of Air Force documents, the flights to, from, and around Ireland for the June 17 – 19, 2013 trip totaled 33.6 hours at $228,288 an hour, which comes to a flight expense alone of $7,670,476.80  (These records came in response to a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information lawsuit filed on January 13, 2014.)

•  According to the DHS documents, the total cost for “security and/or other services” for the Dublin side-trip by Michelle Obama and her entourage was $251,161.86, including $55,004.85 at the Shelbourne Hotel and $70,855.44 at the Westbury Hotel. Vehicle rental charges were $114,721. (These records also came in response to a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information lawsuit filed on January 13, 2014.)

  Now I can hear the White House’s defense. This was a business trip. It’s all about diplomatic relations, etc., etc.  And while this might at times be true for the president, it is certainly not true for the other members of the First Family.”

Read on

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Saturday Steyn

Twerking Your Way Through College

 

 

 

 

 

” Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs has a new academic discipline for America’s scholars:

  The course, called The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender and Media, is a 251-level special topics course taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology Carolyn Chernoff. The professor encourages students to look past the colon in her course title and see what the class is really about.

In the photograph at right, it’s actually not that difficult to see past the colon.

  Skidmore junior Layla Lakos, a sociology/philosophy major, first heard about the new Miley course on Facebook. Lakos laughed, but was intrigued all the same.

” You can study a lot of things based on Miley,” she said. “She represents how transient wealth and fame can be, and shows how possible it is to change your image.”

  One of the easiest ways to understand how transient wealth is is to invest a six-figure sum in Twerk State University. The Atlantic reports on “the least valuable colleges and majors in America“:

  The self-reported earnings of art majors from Murray State are so low that after two decades, a typical high school grad will have out-earned them by nearly $200,000. “

 

~ Since we’re talking about The Atlantic, a few years ago, back when I was the magazine’s obituarist, a New Hampshire neighbor of mine called me up and said they were considering mortgaging the family homestead because their daughter wanted to go to Columbia Journalism School. Her ambition was to be an editor at The Atlantic and, as I wrote for the magazine, they thought I might have some useful advice for her. I don’t have a degree from Columbia Journalism School or even Murray State University; I don’t have a high-school diploma. Apparently, that’s fine if you want to write a column for the magazine, but to copy-edit the same column, and to correct any Canadian spellings I may have slipped in, your parents need to mortgage the home your family’s lived in for the last two-and-a-quarter centuries.”

 

 

Make this your mandatory Saturday morning read … Mr Steyn is spot on , as usual .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Moochelle And Her Vacation Of The Month Club

Right Wing News

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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First It’s Feds Flying First Class , Now It’s Using Government Jets For Non-Official Business

Federal Employees Using Government Aircraft For Hundreds Of Non-Official Missions, GAO Says

 

 

 

” Senior federal officials use government airplanes for many non-official purposes, but agencies don’t track the trips, according to the Government Accountability Office.

  More than 1,700 aircraft are owned or leased by the federal government and are used to “accomplish a wide variety of missions,” including firefighting and law enforcement, according to GAO.

  From fiscals years 2009 through 2011, for example, the FBI didn’t report to GSA 395 unclassified non-mission trips that cost around $7.8 million, according to GAO. “

 

 

    This report comes just two weeks after another GAO report that documented the outrageous abuse of Federal employees flying first class instead of coach at an additional cost to taxpayer of millions of dollars per year . We the taxpayers are being taken for fools .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Biden & Obama Show Us How To “Move” … Our Money Into The Trashcan

President Obama & Vice President Biden Show Us How They Move

 

 

 

 

    Jogging in their dress clothes … yeah , right . What a bunch of idiots . How much did this idiotic video cost the taxpayers ? Be sure to check out the comments on the Youtube page . Some of them are priceless . 

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847,000 … The Number Of Buildings , Structures & Parking Lots Owned Or Leased By US Government

Selling Federal Government Buildings

 

 

 

 

” How many buildings does the federal government own? 10,000? 20,000? Actually, it is a staggering 306,000, according to the U.S. General Services Administration. In addition, the government leases 55,000 buildings, for a total of 361,000. These include offices, hospitals, warehouses, and other sorts of facilities. The chart shows federal buildings owned by department.

  In addition to all the buildings, the federal government owns and leases a remarkable 486,000 structures such as parking lots. The GSA reports that the annual operating costs for all the buildings and structures is $33 billion. The current market value of the buildings is unknown, but the government estimated that the replacement value in 2007 was $1.5 trillion.

  A good way to save taxpayer money and increase economic efficiency would be to start privatizing these assets. The government itself says that it has about 77,000 buildings that are underutilized or unneeded.”

 

   It’s no surprise that the government does a very poor job of maintaining the properties under it’s control . It’s the same old story , the best stewards of the land are the people that own it . Contrary to progressive belief conservation of anything is best left to the ones most directly affected . Human nature is such that care is directly related to cost .

 

” It is widely recognized that the government is a poor manager of its assets. The GAO has had federal property on its “high risk” waste list for years, and it has found that “many assets are in an alarming state of deterioration.” “

 

Cato Institute has the story

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Future Politician … We’d Laugh If It Wasn’t So True

This Boy Has A Future In Congress

 

 

” Or A Genius, Who At Age 1 Figured-Out That The Federal Reserve Isn’t Federal & Has NO Gold or Reserves –>Worthless “

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80% Of Pork-Laden $Trillion Farm Bill Goes To Food Stamps

Catfish Oversight, Weather Radios And A Christmas Tree Tax: Meet The Pork-Filled $956 BILLION Farm Bill

• ” The massive five-years agriculture spending plan, signed Friday by President Obama, includes a $3 million plan for Christmas tree taxes
• Most of the bill covers food stamps, with the number of benefit recipients doubling since Obama took office
• The U.S. will spend $1 billion per year loaning money to sugar barons so they can keep prices stable and avoid overseas competition
• Another $100 million will go to study how to get Americans to buy more maple syrup
• $1 million will buy weather radios for rural Americans, despite plunging hundreds of weather apps for smartphones and plunging access rates”

 

” The federal government pays for a $15 million ‘wool trust fund,’ runs a $170 million program to protect catfish growers from overseas competition, sets aside $3 million to promote Christmas trees, funds another $2 million to help farmers sell more sheep, and plunks down $100 million researching how to get Americans to buy more maple syrup. 

  And that spending is just three one-hundredths of one per cent of the Farm Bill that President Barack Obama signed Friday in Michigan.

  Liberal and conservative watchdogs alike are hopping mad at what they say are pork-barrel projects included in the five-year agriculture spending law as home-state perks to lawmakers that are  unneeded or redundant.

  There’s a new 15-cent levy on every live-cut Christmas tree, a proposal that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had blocked but will now be beyond his control. Tree growers will put the money into a fund for ‘industry-funded promotion, research, and information program[s],’ but the cost will inevitably be passed on to consumers.”

   While there is plenty of pork to feed Congress’  corporate cronies the lion’s share of the “Farm” bill goes to foster government dependency for the individual …

 

 

 

” One in five American households receive food stamps today. More than 1 million people were added to the rolls in 2013, including residents who live in the country illegally.

  In the year 2000 the entire food stamp program cost $17 billion. Last year that figure was $78 billion.

  The rest of the Farm Bill, all $200 billion of it, includes some subsidy payments to members of Congress and their families who are engaged in agriculture.”

Read the rest if you can stomach it .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Taxpayer Dollars Squandered On Obamacare Exchanges To Date ? … $5 BILLION And Counting

Billions Wasted On Flawed Obamacare Exchanges

 

 

 

” The federal taxpayers have spent over $5 billion to build Obamacare’s exchanges. Unfortunately for taxpayers, these investments have not delivered a good return and are ongoing.

  Despite the muddled launch of many exchanges, the federal government is still doling out grant money, giving out over $200 million to nine states last month. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia are running their own Obamacare exchanges and they all received federal grant money to help build them—a total of over $4 billion. California alone received $1 billion to set up its exchange.

  Many state-based exchanges have struggled with similar website problems as the federal healthcare.gov site, and some are still barely operational despite being four months into the open enrollment period.”

 

Heritage.org has more

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Taxpayers Fund Union Lobbyist’s Efforts To Receive More Taxpayer Funds

Public Pays For Government Unions To Lobby For More Federal Spending

 

 

” Witold Skwierczynski has not done work for the Social Security Administration for more than 30 years, even though he was paid by the agency as a claims representative the entire time.

  Instead, he spends his days on full-time release from his regular job to work for his federal employee union.

  The practice is called “official time,” a creation of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. It allows union representatives to do exclusively union business while still drawing full pay and benefits from the taxpayers.

  Official time cost about $155.6 million in 2011, the most recent year for which totals are available from the Office of Personnel Management.

  Federal employees spent 3.4 million hours working for their unions at taxpayers’ expense, the equivalent of more than 1,700 full-time positions.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ex-TSA Agent: Dear America, I Saw You Naked

And Yes, We Were Laughing. Confessions Of An Ex-TSA Agent

 

 

 

 

 

” My pained relationship with government security had started three years earlier. I had just returned to Chicago to finish my bachelor’s degree after a two-year stint in Florida. I needed a job to help pay my way through school, and the TSA’s call-back was the first one I received. It was just a temporary thing, I told myself—side income for a year or two as I worked toward a degree in creative writing. It wasn’t like a recession would come along and lock me into the job or anything.

  It was May 2007. I was living with a bohemian set on Chicago’s north side, a crowd ranging from Foucault-fixated college kids to middle-aged Bukowski-bred alcoholics. We drank and talked politics on the balcony in the evenings, pausing only to sneer at hipsters strumming back-porch Beatles sing-a-longs. By night, I took part in barbed criticism of U.S foreign policy; by day, I spent eight hours at O’Hare in a federal uniform, solemnly carrying out orders passed down from headquarters.

  I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying.”

   Learn more about the cretinous behavior of our “protectors” from someone who was there , and you can further enlighten yourself to the massive abuses of the TSA at Master List of TSA Crimes and Abuses .

   In the interests of fairness we should point out that the TSA has offered a rebuttal of ex-agent Harrington’s claims reported on by the Daily Caller , an excerpt of which can be found below .

 

” “Every passenger deserves to be treated with dignity and respect and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) policy upholds this standard. TSA does not tolerate any form of unethical or unlawful behavior by its employees and takes swift disciplinary action if discovered,” he added.”

 

 

   Ah yes , “dignity and respect” , is that what this is called ?

 

 

 

 

” In his article Harrington details how TSA agents gawked at the nude images of passengers in the recently eliminated “nude” body-scanners, how agents were instructed to profile people from Middle Eastern countries (excluding Pakistan and Saudi Arabia), that agents would use pat downs as retaliation for rudeness, and the fact that even TSA employees lacked confidence in the system.”

 

 

As with all things State once they are caught , the mea culpa is acknowledged along with the predictable promise that “things are different now ” …. Sure

 

 

 

 

 

 

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End Hollywood Welfare Now

Stop The American Hustle

 

 

 

” In 2012, the people of North Carolina paid Marvel Studios $20 million to shoot Robert Downey Jr.’s latest comic-book sequel, “Iron Man 3,” in their state. It was just one of many movies and television shows taxpayers subsidized in North Carolina that year. Among them were season 8 of“The Bachelorette” and Jennifer Aniston’s “We’re the Millers” — a film that The Fresno Bee said “aims for mediocrity and hits it with a dull thud.”

  Subsidies like these for the entertainment industry exist all over the country, in Florida and Michigan and Ohio. Georgia taxpayers in 2012 funded “Tyler Perry’s Aunt Bam’s Place,” “Tyler Perry’s I Don’t Want to Do Wrong” and the latest Vince Vaughn–Luke Wilson buddy flick, “The Internship.”

  With so much public money going toward these ventures, it’s reasonable to question whether they bring the public any actual benefit — and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. In 2010 in Michigan, the state Senate authored a report on film industry incentives and found that, in one year, the state had spent $100 million to create only $60 million in economic activity. Of the spending stimulated — by the production of such gems as “A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas”— the report found that almost half occurred out of state. Such doubts were compounded by a November report from the office of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, which could not find “sufficient justification for the size of the film credits.” The amount of public money spent on a production company, it said, was the equivalent of paying a factory 40 times what it owed in taxes.

  The film industry, now under scrutiny for engaging in these practices, is just one example of a much larger problem. Tax credits for businesses, in theory, are meant to be a means of using public money to stimulate private-sector growth and create jobs. Yet many subsidies don’t pay off in the form of public benefits, and few come with any measures for accountability, preventing the public from ever knowing if it’s getting its money’s worth. Walmart, for instance, has used “more than $1.2 billion in tax breaks, free land, infrastructure assistance, low-cost financing and outright grants from state and local governments around the country,” according to Good Jobs First’s Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch website. Sports franchises frequently approach cities and suburban regions with proposals for new stadiums funded by public dollars, touting them as job creators.”

 

 

 

Read more

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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10 MORE Ridiculous Government Expenditures

10 Most Ridiculous Things You Didn’t Know Your Tax Money Was Going Towards

 

 

” 1 – $384,949 spent on a federal study that looks at ‘‘Plasticity in Duck Penis Length.‘ Wait, it gets better.

 

 

2 – $1 million to New York to put up some road signs telling drivers they are spending money … on road projects. It gets better. “

 

 

 But never forget …

 

 

See the rest at For America

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Federal Government Wastes $100 Billion Each Year Just On Erroneous Payments

Feds Blow $100 Billion Annually On Incorrect Payments

 

 

 

 

” Between 2002 and 2012, federal agencies spent more than half a trillion dollars ($688 billion) on payments that should never have been made. 

  Every year, according to their own recordkeeping, the agencies that administer major federal programs are now paying out more than $100 billion dollars improperly, and even though they’re aware of the problem, they recover only a tiny fraction for taxpayers. This adds up to huge losses for the U.S. Treasury.

  In 2012 alone, the Office of Management and Budget gathered data on just 13 high-error programs in the federal government, and determined that they made a combined $101.3 billion in improper payments. To put that in perspective, that’s almost $16 billion more than the highly controversial budget sequester wound up cutting from government spending in 2013.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Justice Dept To Spend Over $500K On LinkedIn Profile

Justice Dept To Spend $544,000 On A…WHAT!? You Won’t Believe This.

 

 

 

 

” According to the government website FedBizOpps.gov, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division is spending $544,000 on a new LinkedIn profile:

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division is paying $544,000 for a shiny new LinkedIn profile, in the wake of a partial government shutdown that followed a top Democrat’s assurance that ‘the cupboard is bare, there’s no more cuts to make.’ “

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nick Gillespie’s One Christmas Wish … No Government Santa Claus

“My One-Item Christmas List: A Government That Stops Playing Santa”

 

 

 

” I’ve got a new column up at Time’s Ideas section. Here’s the opening:

  Forget a new car, Beats by Dre, or even affordable health care. You know what I really, really, really want for Christmas?

  I want a government that spends less money. I’m not alone in such a wish. Even President Obama, who has asked for more and more spending in each of his annual budget proposals, has called the nation’s long-term spending patterns “unsustainable.” “

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Helpful Infographic That Explains Our $37.6 Billion In Foreign Aid For 2012

$37,680,000,000: That’s How Much The U.S. Spent On Foreign Aid In 2012 — Here’s A Chart That Helps Explain It

 

 

 

 

 

 

” The United States spends billion of dollars each year on foreign aid .

  In fact, the U.S. sent approximately $37,680,000,000 overseas in 2012 for foreign aid, according to Finance Degree Center, a website dedicated to finance education.”

The Blaze has more .

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Clinton Birthplace Costs Taxpayers $33 Per Visitor … And That’s A Drop In The Bucket For NPS Waste

Americans Pay $33.10 For Every Visitor To Clinton Birthplace

National Park

 

 

 

” It costs the federal government $33.10 for every visitor to the national park created to commemorate President Clinton’s birthplace — which averages just 24 people a day, according to a scathing new report that says Congress has created far more parks than the system can handle. “

 

 

 

 

” Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican and Capitol Hill’s top waste-watcher, said in the new report that Congress is more intent on creating new parks than it is on spending money to maintain existing ones, which has led to major problems at some of the gems of the system, such as a $24 million backlog on work on trails at the Grand Canyon or the $2 million in tort claims the government faced one year from patrons tripping on bad sidewalks at Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia.

But the Clinton park, located in Hope, Ark., is particularly stunning since it was Mr. Clinton who signed a law in 1998 to try to clamp down on frivolous new parks — only to see Congress break that rule in 2009 to create one for his birthplace.”

 

 

The Hope , Arkansas national park is just the tip of the NPS waste machine . Read on :

 

 

” “The NPS is subsidizing Washington D.C. area concerts, preserving parks in foreign countries, and purchasing even more park property — including real estate on the U.S. Virgin Islands for nearly $1 million per acre,” Mr. Coburn wrote in the report. “At the same time, the crowned jewels of our National Park System have become tarnished.”

The 208-page report takes a hard look at some of the park properties and how much use they are getting.

Mr. Coburn said more Americans were struck by lightning in 2012 than visited Aniakchak National Monument in Alaska, which saw just 19 visitors that year. Indeed, Alaska accounted for three of the six parks with the highest cost per visitor in 2012, according to the Coburn report figures.”

 

 

     The Daily Caller offers many additional details in their reporting of the findings in Dr Coburn’s new report on waste and lays out some examples besides the NPS waste mentioned above . It makes for very disturbing reading and thus should be spread far and wide .

 

 

” With 401 “park units,” 27,000 historical structures, 2,461 national historic landmarks, 582 national natural landmarks, 49 national heritage areas and over 84 million acres of land, just 10 percent of the National Park Service’s $3 billion annual park budget goes to the 25 most popular parks. And this year, maintenance will be underfunded by a quarter of a billion dollars, according to “Parked!.”

The report explains that National Park visitor experiences are threatened by deteriorating facilities as resources are provided to “inessential activities,” duplicative programs, the purchase of more park units, preservation of foreign parks, and even subsidizing Washington, D.C.-area entertainment.

The more than 200-page report further highlights that while well-known entities like the National Mall deteriorate, lesser-known and unvisited parks suck up funding.

The report also delves into various categories of questionable parks:

1)                  Political or special interest rather than national importance;

2)                  Inaccessible to the public;

3)                  Important but would be better honored in a different capacity; and

4)                  Lacking national significance or authentic historical value.

 

Some of the waste highlights from the Coburn report include:

– $30 million campaign to celebrate 100 Year Anniversary Celebration: To prepare for the National Park Service centennial celebration in 2016, the National Park Service has hired the Grey Group, a high-end international marketing firm. The NPS will reportedly pay the firm $6 million annually for five years to manage “a multiplatform communications initiative.”

–$367,000 for music festivals: Despite the uproars of budget constraints during sequestration, NPS spent $367,000 to support various music festivals during the summer of 2013. NPS spent $29,000 on the Richmond Folk Festival, $18,000 for the New Bedford Water Front Festival, $58,000 for the National Folk Festival Showcase in St. Louis, Missouri, $32,000 for the Blue Ridge Music Festival, and $230,000 through two separate grants for a series of folk festivals in Lowell, Massachusetts. NPS even provides the Lowell Festival Foundation staff a “government-owned cell phone for official uses and the performance of assigned duties.”

–$174,000 3D HD Underwater Imaging Project: NPS has provided $174,000 to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to document underwater natural and cultural features in 3D high- definition (HD). The project’s purpose was to show “rarely seen resources to the public through a stimulating and immersive 3D HD technology” surrounding various national park units, including Isle Royale National Park and Pearl Harbor National Historic Site. Instead of funding an expensive photo-shoot or rarely seen objects, the $174,000 could have been used to fix the too often seen degenerated structures.

–NPS provides funds for Inflatable Fair Rides: The scope of the NPS has expanded to funding inflatable rides at county fairs. In August 2012, NPS provided $2,500 to rent inflatable rides at Hoover Hometown Days, an annual festival in West Branch, Iowa.

–7 years, 3 studies and $731,000 spent investigating Gateway Arch for cleaning without any cleaning getting done: The NPS spent at least $731,000 on three studies over a seven year span to inspect the Gateway Arch for stains to be cleaned, without actually doing any cleaning. A public information officer said that “One of the reasons it takes so long is it’s not easy to access to look at closely…. We’re taking it step by step, we want to do it correctly, we don’t want to cause any harm, we don’t want to waste dollars starting a process that’s incorrect.”

–NPS Video Game Production: The NPS National Center for Preservation Training and Technology awarded a $25,000 grant to a Rochester Institute of Technology professor “to develop an interactive video game that will transport students to virtual worlds of preservation and conservation archetypes.” The video game is based on the role-playing game, Elderscrolls IV: Oblivion, and players will be able to assume “the role of a conservator, conservation scientist or collection manager by virtually interacting with objects, materials and data embedded in quest narratives.” Various game options will allow players “to manage a library and protect it from the elements that accelerate deterioration. Another quest will allow players to take samples from ancient artifacts and analyze them to discover the secrets of its past.” NPS also developed “Hold the Fort,” a video game that allows players to be “in charge of Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore, responsible for the defense of the fort and the city.” In the meantime, the real Fort McHenry National Monument & Historic Site has accumulated $3.58 million in deferred maintenance needs.

–NPS spends $79,000 to collect data on “Visitor Perceptions of Climate Change in U.S. National Parks”: In August 2013, the Park Service awarded a $79,000 to the Center for Climate Change Communication “to investigate the climate change perceptions of visitors to National Parks and their reception of place-based climate change messages.” The survey will be based on Yale University’s “Global Warming’s Six America’s Survey,” which divides the public into six groups along a spectrum of attitudes towards the impacts of climate change from Alarmed to Dismissive. It is unclear what the connection between a visitor’s attitude towards climate change and whether they are inside a National Park boundary or not, but it is clear that NPS funding would be better spent fixing the visitors’ reality of $11.5 billion worth of crumbling infrastructure. The NPS expenditure is especially questionable given the massive investment the federal government already makes towards climate change programs. Between FY2008 and FY2012, 14 separate federal agencies spent $68.4 billion on climate change activities.

-And NPS spends $3.4 million per year for a Natural Sounds Program, which works to “protect, maintain, or restore acoustical environments throughout the National Park System.” The program produces documents that provide practical advice such as “visitors and park employees can improve their natural and cultural soundscape experience in our national parks by simply becoming more aware of the sounds around them.”

You can read the report in it’s entirety here .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Great Britain Scraps Multi-Billion Dollar Healthcare Computer System As Unworkable

After Nine Years And With Billions Already Spent, Doomed Computer System Is Abandoned

 

 

 

 

 

” A plan to create the world’s largest single civilian computer system linking all parts of the National Health Service is to be abandoned by the Government after running up billions of pounds in bills. Ministers are expected to announce next month that they are scrapping a central part of the much-delayed and hugely controversial 10-year National Programme for IT.

Instead, local health trusts and hospitals will be allowed to develop or buy individual computer systems to suit their needs – with a much smaller central server capable of “interrogating” them to provide centralized information on patient care. News of the Government’s plans comes as a damning report from a cross-party committee of MPs concludes that the £11.4bn programme had proved “beyond the capacity of the Department of Health to deliver”.

The Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said that, while the intention of creating a centralized database of electronic patient records was a “worthwhile aim”, a huge amount of money had been wasted.”

 

 

   Central planning is always doomed to failure . Are we going to have to waste billions before the idiots in Washington can admit their mistakes or will we learn from the UK’s experience ? There is no one size fits all solution … it’s called the human condition .

   Included in the Independent’s article about the NHS fail is a list of other government IT undertakings that have also squandered hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds only to be scrapped as failures . Below is the list .

 

 

 

” IT disasters…

E-Borders (Cancelled June 2011)

The scheme was originally created to check passenger details against UK police immigration watch lists. The Government tore up supplier Raytheon’s £742m contract on the e-Borders immigration programme in July last year, after delays led the Home Office committee to say it had “no confidence”in the company.

Department Home Office

Cost £118m

ID Cards (Cancelled in January 2011)

Ministers claimed ID cards would help in the fight against illegal immigration and terrorism by storing details of all UK citizens on a centralised database. The scheme proved unpopular and was scrapped in January this year.

Department Home Office

Cost £257m (Source: Home Office)

Electoral register database (Cancelled in July 2011)

Plans to create an expensive database of electors were abandoned by the Government last month. The Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors (Core) was legislated for in 2006 and intended to make it easier for political parties to verify the legitimacy of their donors.

Department Ministry of Justice

Cost The database, which would have been administered by a new independent public body, would have cost an estimated £11.4m.

Firecontrol (Cancelled in December 2010)

Firecontrol aimed to replace 46 fire control centres in England with nine regional sites. The project was scrapped in December 2010 after suffering a series of delays, increased costs and an inadequate IT contract, according to a select committee report.

Department Communities and Local Government

Cost £469m (Source: National Audit Office)

Scope 2 (Cancelled July 2009)

The project was designed to allow the secure sharing of sensitive intelligence data between relevant departments in government and officials abroad. It was cancelled after reports of technological problems and escalating costs.

Department Cabinet Office

Cost £24.4m (Source: Cabinet Office)

 

Story of a sick system

October 2002 The Department for Health launches the NHS National Programme for IT, in a bid to create an electronic care record for patients in England and connect 30,000 general practitioners to 300 hospitals.

2006 Accenture, the largest contractor, walks out on contracts worth £2bn, writing off hundreds of millions of pounds in the process. Months earlier, the US software supplier, IDX, also quit the project.

2007 The Government misses its first deadlines as a report by the King’s Fund criticises the Government’s “apparent reluctance to audit and evaluate the programme”.

2008 A report to the Enfield Primary Care Trust reveals difficulties with the system the previous year saw 63 patients of the Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS trust have their operations delayed because of missing data. The trust previously found the system had failed to flag up possible child-abuse victims.

2009 An earlier Public Accounts Committee report notes that the project has provided “little clinical functionality… to date”. “

 

    Government can be trusted to do two things well … waste money and intrude on the people’s rights . It succeeds at  nothing else .

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Obamacare Woes Widen As Insurers Get Wrong Data …

… Experts Say Website Built On Ten-Year-Old Technology Will Need To Be Constantly Fixed And Then Totally Overhauled

 

 

 

” After weeks of a dysfunctioning website and mass derision, the Obamacare exchange woes are only starting as some are now giving insurers the wrong date on patients. And the trouble isn’t over.

One technology expert claims the faulty sites, which cost nearly $400 million to build, were made on ten-year-old technology that will require constant fixes and eventually the entire system will have to be overhauled.

A technology expert said the flaws could do lasting damage to the law if customers are deterred from signing up or mistakenly believe they have obtained coverage.

 John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, told USA Today that recent changes have made the system easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer’s cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. “

 

 

 

 

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