Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

[Dos Equis]

Brilliant.   

Biden Spends $1 Million Annually for Weekend Trips
Monday, 04 Jun 2012 05:04 PM
By Ronald Kessler

Ronald Kessler reporting from Washington, D.C. — Last June, President Obama appointed Vice President Joe Biden to root out wasteful government spending. But behind the scenes, it’s a different matter.

Every Friday, Biden takes a helicopter designated as Marine Two from the vice president’s residence to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and then hops on Air Force Two to fly back to his home in Delaware. At the end of the weekend, he returns on Air Force Two, usually a Boeing C-32.

During warm weather, Biden regularly returns to Andrews on the airplane on Saturdays to play golf at the Air Force base with President Obama. After the golf game, he flies back to Delaware and returns to Washington on the plane on Sunday evening — all at taxpayer expense.

The cost of flying Air Force Two is $22,000 an hour, so each half-hour trip to or from Delaware costs about $10,000. Each golf game costs taxpayers $20,000. At that rate, the annual cost to taxpayers of Biden’s weekend trips is well over $1 million.

In addition, the Secret Service rents more than 20 condominiums in the Wilmington, Del. area for agents who must accompany Biden when he returns to his home state.

Biden’s press office had no immediate comment.

“Biden leaves every Friday from Joint Base Andrews, so he gets lifts from the observatory via Marine Two to Andrews Air Force Base, takes off via Air Force Two, lands in Delaware, and stays the weekend and then comes back on Sunday nights,” says a Secret Service agent familiar with the trips.

“Every three or four weeks when it’s warm, he gets up there on Saturday and then will fly back on Air Force Two,” the agent says. “While Air Force Two is sitting on the tarmac at Andrews, he goes and plays golf with the president at Andrews Air Force Base, gets back on the plane, and flies back to Delaware. Let me tell you something, that is egregious.”

Besides that, “The Secret Service rents condos in Wilmington because his schedule is so fluid and never concrete enough to properly prepare for his visits to Delaware,” the agent says. “So they keep a fully staffed Secret Service advance team in Delaware in condominiums that we lease so that when he does these things back and forth to D.C., they’re up there ready for him to arrive.”

The Boeing C-32 that usually flies as Air Force Two is a specially configured Boeing 757-200 commercial jet which typically requires a crew of 18.

As a U.S. senator, Biden was proud of the fact that he commuted daily by train from his home in Delaware to Washington during the week. Amtrak named the newly renovated Wilmington station the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Railroad Station. But after taking office as vice president, a Secret Service agent says Biden began the pattern of commuting on Air Force Two on weekends, costing taxpayers close to $4 million so far.

As recently as May 12, Biden flew back to Andrews to play golf with Obama and with Biden’s second son Hunter and White House trip director Marvin Nicholson. They played 18 holes of golf for four and a half hours.

Biden also plays golf at a country club he belongs to in the Wilmington area. The Secret Service agent says that since Air Force Two parks at Andrews, Obama is obviously aware that Biden is running up a huge government tab for each game of golf he plays with him.

Asked if President Obama thinks these costs are appropriate, why he has not questioned Biden flying to play golf with him at a cost of $20,000 per game, and in view of these costs of $1 million a year for weekend trips, whether the vice president should no longer be in charge of cutting government waste, the president’s press office had no immediate comment.

In addition to his salary as vice president of $230,700, Biden has free use of the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory. The vice president’s residence is a handsome 9,150-square-foot, three-story mansion overlooking Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington.

Complete with pool, pool house, and indoor gym, the white brick house was built in 1893 as the home of the superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Congress turned it into the official residence of the vice president in 1974 and gave it the address One Observatory Circle.

During the day, at least five Navy stewards attend to every personal need of the second family, including cleaning, cooking, shopping for food, and doing the laundry.

Biden has portrayed himself as a regular Joe, a product of a working class family who takes on millionaires and Republicans who are said to be out of touch with middle-class Americans.

Last June 13, Obama placed Biden in charge of a Campaign to Cut Waste, which will “hunt down and eliminate misspent tax dollars in every agency and department across the federal government,” according to the White House website.

In an email, Biden told supporters that he was the “new sheriff in town.” He said that “particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it’s a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.”

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Biden-weekend-travel-Air-Force-Two/2012/06/04/id/441168

[Soul Crusher]

Disgusting.   FUJB!!!

[Soul Crusher]

Bon Jovi gets a ride on Air Force One
 
By BYRON TAU |
6/4/12 5:08 PM EDT




Musician Jon Bon Jovi is shown. | Reuters


Rocker Jon Bon Jovi got a lift Monday to New York on Air Force One with President Obama.
 
The Bon Jovi frontman was spotted by reporters rounding a corner at JFK airport in New York City. After he was spotted, the White House acknowledged that he joined the president on the flight. A White House official said he was traveling as a "guest of the President."
 
Bon Jovi is headlining a campaign event at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he will perform for about 500 supporters. According to a White House official, the campaign paid for Bon Jovi's trip.

[Dos Equis]

Iraq Rebuilding Risked Billions in U.S. Funds, Auditor Concludes
Friday, 13 Jul 2012

The U.S. government’s drive to rebuild Iraq “put billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of fraud, waste and abuse,” and the amount misspent will never be known, according to the final report by a U.S. watchdog agency.

The report by Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen, released today, questioned almost $636 million in costs through June. Auditors found such lapses as “inadequate reviews of contractors’ invoices,” a lack of sufficient oversight staff and poor recordkeeping, according to the report.

The U.S. provided more than $51 billion for reconstruction projects in war-torn Iraq from fiscal year 2003 to 2011.

The report said U.S. officials failed in “numerous instances” to thoroughly review contractors’ invoices before paying them. In one case involving a State Department contract, the department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs had one contracting officer validating invoices totaling more than $2.5 billion.

“As a result, invoices were not properly reviewed, and the $2.5 billion in U.S. funds were vulnerable to fraud and abuse,” the report found. The State Department instituted stronger oversight of the contract and recovered more than $60 million that should never have been paid, the report said.

High Turnover

High staff turnover added to the risk of waste and fraud, the inspection agency said. In one case, the U.S. government paid a contractor almost $123 million to build electrical transmission and distribution facilities in southern Iraq, with 14 different contract officers supervising from March 2004 to September 2006. That is a new contracting supervisor every 65 days, undercutting the effectiveness of oversight, the report found.

The agency said work by its investigators and those of other agencies have resulted in 71 convictions and almost $177 million in fines and forfeitures.

Kickbacks were the leading type of criminal activity, accounting for 71 percent of indictments, according to the report. The report said one case involved an army major contracting officer deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait who accepted Rolex watches, cash and other items valued at more than $200,000 in exchange for help to foreign companies seeking Army contracts.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/iraq-reconstruction-fraud-waste/2012/07/13/id/445215

[whork]

Brilliant.   

Biden Spends $1 Million Annually for Weekend Trips
Monday, 04 Jun 2012 05:04 PM
By Ronald Kessler

Ronald Kessler reporting from Washington, D.C. — Last June, President Obama appointed Vice President Joe Biden to root out wasteful government spending. But behind the scenes, it’s a different matter.

Every Friday, Biden takes a helicopter designated as Marine Two from the vice president’s residence to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and then hops on Air Force Two to fly back to his home in Delaware. At the end of the weekend, he returns on Air Force Two, usually a Boeing C-32.

During warm weather, Biden regularly returns to Andrews on the airplane on Saturdays to play golf at the Air Force base with President Obama. After the golf game, he flies back to Delaware and returns to Washington on the plane on Sunday evening — all at taxpayer expense.

The cost of flying Air Force Two is $22,000 an hour, so each half-hour trip to or from Delaware costs about $10,000. Each golf game costs taxpayers $20,000. At that rate, the annual cost to taxpayers of Biden’s weekend trips is well over $1 million.

In addition, the Secret Service rents more than 20 condominiums in the Wilmington, Del. area for agents who must accompany Biden when he returns to his home state.

Biden’s press office had no immediate comment.

“Biden leaves every Friday from Joint Base Andrews, so he gets lifts from the observatory via Marine Two to Andrews Air Force Base, takes off via Air Force Two, lands in Delaware, and stays the weekend and then comes back on Sunday nights,” says a Secret Service agent familiar with the trips.

“Every three or four weeks when it’s warm, he gets up there on Saturday and then will fly back on Air Force Two,” the agent says. “While Air Force Two is sitting on the tarmac at Andrews, he goes and plays golf with the president at Andrews Air Force Base, gets back on the plane, and flies back to Delaware. Let me tell you something, that is egregious.”

Besides that, “The Secret Service rents condos in Wilmington because his schedule is so fluid and never concrete enough to properly prepare for his visits to Delaware,” the agent says. “So they keep a fully staffed Secret Service advance team in Delaware in condominiums that we lease so that when he does these things back and forth to D.C., they’re up there ready for him to arrive.”

The Boeing C-32 that usually flies as Air Force Two is a specially configured Boeing 757-200 commercial jet which typically requires a crew of 18.

As a U.S. senator, Biden was proud of the fact that he commuted daily by train from his home in Delaware to Washington during the week. Amtrak named the newly renovated Wilmington station the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Railroad Station. But after taking office as vice president, a Secret Service agent says Biden began the pattern of commuting on Air Force Two on weekends, costing taxpayers close to $4 million so far.

As recently as May 12, Biden flew back to Andrews to play golf with Obama and with Biden’s second son Hunter and White House trip director Marvin Nicholson. They played 18 holes of golf for four and a half hours.

Biden also plays golf at a country club he belongs to in the Wilmington area. The Secret Service agent says that since Air Force Two parks at Andrews, Obama is obviously aware that Biden is running up a huge government tab for each game of golf he plays with him.

Asked if President Obama thinks these costs are appropriate, why he has not questioned Biden flying to play golf with him at a cost of $20,000 per game, and in view of these costs of $1 million a year for weekend trips, whether the vice president should no longer be in charge of cutting government waste, the president’s press office had no immediate comment.

In addition to his salary as vice president of $230,700, Biden has free use of the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory. The vice president’s residence is a handsome 9,150-square-foot, three-story mansion overlooking Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington.

Complete with pool, pool house, and indoor gym, the white brick house was built in 1893 as the home of the superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Congress turned it into the official residence of the vice president in 1974 and gave it the address One Observatory Circle.

During the day, at least five Navy stewards attend to every personal need of the second family, including cleaning, cooking, shopping for food, and doing the laundry.

Biden has portrayed himself as a regular Joe, a product of a working class family who takes on millionaires and Republicans who are said to be out of touch with middle-class Americans.

Last June 13, Obama placed Biden in charge of a Campaign to Cut Waste, which will “hunt down and eliminate misspent tax dollars in every agency and department across the federal government,” according to the White House website.

In an email, Biden told supporters that he was the “new sheriff in town.” He said that “particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it’s a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.”

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Biden-weekend-travel-Air-Force-Two/2012/06/04/id/441168

 

[Dos Equis]

Labor Department spends stimulus funds for ads during Olbermann, Maddow shows
By Jim McElhatton
The Washington Times
Tuesday, August 21, 2012




The Labor Department paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal stimulus funds to a public relations firm to run more than 100 commercials touting the Obama administration’s “green training” job efforts on two popular MSNBC cable shows, records show.
 
The commercials ran on MSNBC on shows hosted by Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann in 2009, but the contract didn’t report any jobs created, according to records recently reviewed by The Washington Times.
 
Spending reports under the federal Recovery Act show $495,000 paid to McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations LLC, which the Labor Department hired to raise awareness “among employers and influencers about the [Job Corps] program’s existing and new training initiatives in high growth and environmentally friendly career areas” as well as spreading the word to prospective Job Corps enrollees.
 
Ultimately, the firm negotiated ad buys for “two approved spots” airing 14 times per week for two months on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and “The Rachel Maddow Show,” according to a project report, which listed the number zero under a section of the report asking how many jobs had been created through the stimulus contract.
 
David Williams, president of the nonprofit watchdog Taxpayers Protection Alliance, called the contract “questionable” because it created no jobs and because of the placement of the ads on shows viewed as friendly to the administration’s policies.
 
“Hiring a PR firm does not create jobs and this was obviously meant for selling a particular political agenda,” Mr. Williams said. “The placement really reeks of a political ad rather than a job ad, and taxpayers see through this.
 
“Taxpayers would be a lot happier at the end of the day to see a completed road rather than a bunch of ads on cable television,” he said.
 
The public relations firm did not respond to inquiries from The Times about who directed the ads to appear on MSNBC, but Labor Department officials defended the expenditures, saying the decision to place the ads on the network — now NBC News — had nothing to do with politics.
 
In a joint e-mail statement to The Times from two Labor Department spokesmen, David Roberts and Michael Volpe, officials said the money was used for outreach efforts to raise awareness among potential employers about the Job Corps’ green training in career areas, including automotive, advanced manufacturing and solar panel installation.
 
Mr. Roberts and Mr. Volpe also said Labor Department research showed advertisements would reach the target demographic of business owners and managers interested in hiring “green trained” employees through a programming list that initially also included shows hosted by CNN’s Larry King and public television’s Jim Lehrer, as well as the two MSNBC programs where the ads eventually appeared.
 
But public television was eliminated because advertising rates were too high, according Labor officials. And Larry King was dropped because MSNBC held the potential to reach more viewers, officials said. Officials gave no indication whether their research indicated if Fox News, ESPN or other cable outlets were considered for the Job Corps ads.
 
The Labor Department said that as measured in “gross impressions per spot”, the two MSNBC shows — Mr. Olbermann is no longer with the network — were twice as effective as compared to running ads on Mr. King’s show, which also is no longer on the air.
 
The use of tax dollars to promote administration programs and policies is hardly new. It’s a practice that came under sharp scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers upset about advertising during the Bush administration.
 
In 2006, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study requested by Democrats found more than $1.6 billion in public relations and media spending by the Bush administration during a two and a half year span.
 
A search of GAO reports in recent years doesn’t reveal any comparable studies reviewing public relations and media expenditures during the Obama administration. But federal purchasing records available online show thousands of contract actions since the changeover in administrations under specific purchasing codes both for advertising and public relations services.


Read more: Labor Department spends stimulus funds for ads during Olbermann, Maddow shows - Washington Times

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/21/stimulus-funds-spent-obama-ads-olbermann-maddow

[Dos Equis]

Feds Spend $2.2 Million To Study “Why Lesbians Are Obese”

More waste of money!  KCTV7 reports that $2,202,873 of tax payers money was wasted to study why lesbians are fat.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded the money to study the biological and social factors that cause a large number of lesbians to be obese. According to NIH three-quarters of lesbians are obese even though gay males are not — they call it an issue of “high public-health significance.”

A hospital in Boston, Brigham and Women’s, received grants to carry out the study. The overall goal is to study the relationship between sexual orientation and obesity.

Part of the grant reads, “Obesity is one of the most critical public health issues affecting the U.S. today. Racial and socioeconomic disparities in the determinants, distribution, and consequences of obesity are receiving increasing attention.”

“However, one area that is only beginning to be recognized is the striking interplay of gender and sexual orientation in obesity disparities,” it continues, “is now well-established that women of minority sexual orientation are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic. In stark contrast, among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males.”

The Washington Free Beacon reports, “The project has survived budget cuts due to sequestration, which the NIH warned would ‘delay progress in medical breakthroughs.’”

Despite the NIH claiming that the cuts are “delaying progress” in the development of cancer drugs, the lesbian study continues to receive funding.

The NIH said, “NIH research addresses the full spectrum of human health across all populations of Americans. Research into unhealthy human behaviors that are estimated to be the proximal cause of more than half of the disease burden in the U.S. will continue to be an important area of research supported by NIH.”

Is this study worth of $2 million, or is it a waste of tax dollars? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

http://www.thepcmdgazette.com/news/feds-spend-2-2-million-to-study-why-lesbians-are-obese/

[Dos Equis]

Government-Funded Study: Why Is Wikipedia Sexist?
$202,000 to address ‘gender bias’ in world’s biggest online encyclopedia
BY: Elizabeth Harrington 
July 30, 2014

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist.

The government has awarded two grants for collaborative research to professors at Yale University and New York University to study what the researchers describe as “systematic gender bias” in the online encyclopedia.

“Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and has since become the world’s single most important reference tool and information clearinghouse,” the grant states. “Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which are controlled by experts, Wikipedia was supposed to have democratized knowledge.”

“Yet an emerging body of research indicates that Wikipedia suffers from systematic gender bias with respect to both contributors and content,” it continues. “How and why is this bias produced?”

A $132,000 grant was awarded to Julia Adams, a sociology professor at Yale, followed by $70,000 to Hannah Brueckner, the associate dean of social sciences at NYU Abu Dhabi.

The research intends to contribute to efforts to address gender bias, such as the work of Deanna Zandt, a “media technologist” who gives speeches encouraging women to edit Wikipedia.

“The investigators are committed to the goal of training new social scientists amid a landscape of enhanced interdisciplinary understanding,” the grant said. “Yet the potential impact of this project reaches far beyond the academy.”

“Under-representation of female scholars and associated scholarship reduces the quality and completeness of Wikipedia, imposing significant costs on the millions of readers who rely on it,” it said. “The findings from this research should clarify where in the complex chain of knowledge gender disparities arise. The findings should also bolster ongoing efforts to address those disparities, in this case by improving quality and reducing bias on academic—and more general—Wikipedia.”

An ongoing debate exists over whether the website has sexist undertones.

Zandt argues that Wikipedia is biased because the majority of its editors are “young, white, child-free men.”

“There’s nothing inherently wrong with a young, white, child-free man’s perspective, of course—it’s just that there are tons of other perspectives in the world that should influence how a story gets told,” Zandt wrote in an editorial for Forbes last year, entitled, “Yes, Wikipedia Is Sexist—That’s Why It Needs You.”

“It’s not enough to sit back and hope for the best when finding sexist, racist, homophobic, trans*phobic, etc., language or information on Wikipedia,” she said. “In order to fix it, we need lots of different kinds of people to jump in and start editing Wikipedia, too.”

Last year, a New York Times op-ed leveled charges of sexism against Wikipedia because it created a separate entry dedicated to women American novelists, removing female writers from the “American Novelists” page.

Noam Cohen, a columnist for the Times who does not have a Wikipedia page, has asserted the encyclopedia is biased because articles about friendship bracelets are shorter than entries about baseball cards.

“And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on ‘Sex and the City’ includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on ‘The Sopranos’ includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode,” he wrote.

However, the Wikipedia page for “Woman” is much longer than the entry for “Man.”

Slate published a rebuttal to Cohen’s piece, arguing that a gender gap in the number of male contributors does not mean Wikipedia is sexist.

“Wikipedia’s gender imbalance is a non-problem in search of a misguided solution,” wrote Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “Besides, the vast majority of men don’t contribute to Wikipedia, just as the vast majority of women don’t. The site has only 91,000 active contributors; that leaves a lot of men whose ‘voices’ are also not being heard.”

http://freebeacon.com/issues/government-funded-study-why-is-wikipedia-sexist/

[JOHN MATRIX]

'Waste, fraud, and abuse'  - the official democrat motto 

[Dos Equis]

Transparency troubles: Audit finds $619B gap in federal spending site
Published August 06, 2014
FoxNews.com

The Obama administration failed to properly account for how it spent nearly $619 billion, according to a watchdog audit of the main federal website meant to track where taxpayer money is going.

The report from the Government Accountability Office picked apart the website USASpending.gov, and the agencies feeding information to it.

The database of government spending and contracts was created out of a 2006 transparency law, but the GAO found it continues to have serious problems. The Department of Health and Human Services was the worst offender, during the 2012 period GAO examined.

“Although agencies generally reported information for contracts to USASpending.gov, they did not properly report information on assistance awards, totaling nearly $619 billion,” the GAO reported.

USA Today first reported on the GAO audit.

According to the GAO findings, funding for more than 300 programs was not reported correctly. HHS topped the list of scofflaws, failing to report or reporting late $543.8 billion worth of spending. Part of the reason the number was so high is the agency was not providing information about direct payments to individuals, like for the massive Medicaid program HHS administers.

The Department of Veterans Affairs was next on the list, with $64 billion in spending not properly accounted for.

Further, the report found few contracts and grants were properly reported with all the required information. The GAO found just 2-7 percent of the awards had information “fully consistent” with agencies’ own records.

A spokesman for the White House budget office told USA Today that the administration is trying to improve the data on the site.

“OMB is committed to federal spending transparency and working with agencies to improve the completeness and accuracy of data submissions," he said in a statement.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/06/transparency-troubles-audit-finds-61b-gap-in-federal-spending-site/

[TheGrinch]

and you guys are going to do what other than complain about it?

[Dos Equis]

Vote.

Fortunately, there are groups like Judicial Watch and others that try and shine the light on these things. 

[blacken700]

this waste doesn,t happen under the repubs  brahahahahAHAHA

[Dos Equis]

this waste doesn,t happen under the repubs  brahahahahAHAHA

Who said that?

[blacken700]

Who said that?

YOU DID

Vote.

Fortunately, there are groups like Judicial Watch and others that try and shine the light on these things 

[Dos Equis]

YOU DID

Vote.

Fortunately, there are groups like Judicial Watch and others that try and shine the light on these things 

I didn't say anything about voting for a particular party.     Judicial Watch pursues Democrats and Republicans. 

[Soul Crusher]

http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/06/medicare-wasted-millions-on-hiv-treatments-for-patients-who-didnt-have-hiv


 

[Dos Equis]

Wasted! Feds spend millions of tax dollars getting monkeys drunk


By Drew Johnson - The Washington Times -
Thursday, September 11, 2014

There’s a whole lot of drinking going on in the name of government science, and some watchdogs think it’s the American taxpayer who is getting hammered.

Right now the National Institutes of Health is spending $3.2 million to get monkeys to drink alcohol excessively to determine what effect it has long term on their body tissue.
 
NIH also has handed out $69,459 to the University of Missouri to study whether text messaging college students before they attend pre-football game tailgates will encourage them to drink less and “reduce harmful effects related to alcohol consumption.”

And the government’s premier research arm has doled out money in recent years for research on binge-drinking mice, inebriated gamblers and pilots seeking the sensation of flying drunk — on a simulator of course.

NIH defends such expenditures on the grounds that these research projects help those they fund improve their “potential to develop into a productive, independent research scientist.”

In an email to The Washington Times, the NIH pointed out that the goal of the Missouri text message project wasn’t just to save the lives of coeds but also to empower “promising predoctoral students to obtain individualized, mentored research training from outstanding faculty sponsors while conducting dissertation research in scientific health-related fields relevant to the missions of the participating NIH Institutes and Centers.”
 
In other words, it’s the sort of stuff that gets scientists excited.

But with 50,000 grants totaling $24 billion each year at taxpayer expense, NIH has some spending watchdogs and lawmakers in Congress wondering whether it has become a drunken spender that has wandered too far astray from its core mission.

“The National Institutes of Health has an outrageously large budget and gives away money with no real consideration of whether the projects being funded are of any value to taxpayers,” said David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, a think thank focused on waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer moneys.

For its use of American tax dollars to study inebriated pilots, mice, monkeys and students, the NIH wins this week’s Golden Hammer, a weekly award from The Times aimed at highlighting examples of questionable or wasteful spending.

Congress created the NIH to develop “knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life and reduce illness and disability.” But taxpayer advocates question whether many of its projects today really meet that mission.

“This is an agency that wastes our tax dollars to determine whether cutting the ovaries out of prepubescent rabbits causes them to have heart attacks, if physical activity can alleviate erectile dysfunction in obese men and what’s the best way to reduce tobacco use in Indonesia,” Mr. Williams said, citing some of his favorite examples. “Some of the projects the NIH funds are absolutely embarrassing.”

Alcohol and other vices have long been a favorite of NIH research grants.

Between 2008 and 2010 the NIH granted Yale University and Arizona State University a combined $154,688 to determine if drinking excess amounts of alcohol leads to losing more money while gambling.

To perform the study, researchers plied 21- to 30-year-old volunteers with enough alcohol for them to become legally intoxicated. Researchers then measured how well the twentysomethings performed gambling on video poker machines while drunk compared to when they were sober.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/11/golden-hammer-feds-spends-millions-to-study-drunke/#ixzz3D7iKmoWM

[headhuntersix]

This is why I laugh when they tell us we have to cut defense spending and that our 'benefits' are to high compared to the civilian sector. First off, the uniformed side has very little to do with the budget processes that waste all this cash. The same assholes wasting money in the DOJ or HHS are the same in the DOD. The civilians run all this shit. We waste more money doing stupid shit, buying crap that doesn't work and going on trips that are way unnecessary. We could buy a new carrier with all the wasted trips they send people on.

[Dos Equis]

$39,643,352 worth of NIH funding that could have gone to the Ebola vaccine
By Elizabeth Harrington
Published October 17, 2014
Washington Free Beacon

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent more than $39 million on obese lesbians, origami condoms, texting drunks, and dozens of other projects that could have been scrapped in favor of developing an Ebola vaccine.

“Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready,” said NIH Director Francis Collins, blaming budget cuts for his agency’s failure to develop a vaccine for the deadly virus.

However, the Washington Free Beacon has uncovered $39,643,352 worth of NIH studies within the past several years that have gone to questionable research.

For instance, the agency has spent $2,873,440 trying to figure out why lesbians are obese, and $466,642 on why fat girls have a tough time getting dates. Another $2,075,611 was spent encouraging old people to join choirs.

Millions have gone to “text message interventions,” including a study where researchers sent texts to drunks at the bar to try to get them to stop drinking. The project received an additional grant this year, for a total of $674,590.

The NIH is also texting older African Americans with HIV ($372,460), HIV and drug users in rural areas ($693,000), HIV smokers ($763,519), pregnant smokers ($380,145), teen moms ($243,839), and meth addicts ($360,113). Text message interventions to try to get obese people to lose weight have cost $2,707,067.

The NIH’s research on obesity has led to spending $2,101,064 on wearable insoles and buttons that can track a person’s weight, and $374,670 to put on fruit and vegetable puppet shows for preschoolers.

Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10/17/3643352-worth-nih-funding-that-could-have-gone-to-ebola-vaccine/

[Pray_4_War]

Biden is really concerned about global warming I can see.

[Soul Crusher]

http://www.neurope.eu/news/wire/ap-investigation-nazi-war-crime-suspects-collected-millions-dollars-us-social-security-0

[Soul Crusher]

Thousands of federal workers on extended paid leave
The Washington Post via Drudge Report ^  | October 20, 2014 | Lisa Rein

Posted on ‎10‎/‎21‎/‎2014‎ ‎9‎:‎25‎:‎58‎ ‎AM by upbeat5

Tens of thousands of federal workers are being kept on paid leave for at least a month — and often for longer stretches that can reach a year or more — while they wait to be punished for misbehavior or cleared and allowed to return to work, government records show.

During a three-year period that ended last fall, more than 57,000 employees were sent home for a month or longer. The tab for these workers exceeded $775 million in salary alone.

The extensive use of administrative leave continues despite government personnel rules that limit paid leave for employees facing discipline to “rare circumstances” in which the employee is considered a threat. The long-standing rules were written in an effort to curb waste and deal quickly with workers accused of misconduct.

And the comptroller general, the top federal official responsible for auditing government finances and practices, has repeatedly ruled that federal workers should not be sidelined for long periods for any reason.

But a report by the Government Accountability Office, first made public by The Washington Post on its Web site Monday, found that 53,000 civilian employees were kept home for one to three months during the three fiscal years that ended in September 2013. About 4,000 were idled for three months to a year and several hundred for one to three years. This is the first time the government has calculated the scope and cost of administrative leave.


(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...

[Dos Equis]

Audit: Taxpayer dollars paid for eco group’s $25G Christmas party, and more
Published December 03, 2014
FoxNews.com

$25,000 for a Christmas party.

$11,000 for premium coffee services.

Millions more for questionable construction costs.

All this was billed to taxpayers by an obscure federally funded science group, according to a scathing new inspector general report.

The audit, conducted by the National Science Foundation inspector general and the Defense Contract Audit Agency, detailed spending by the Colorado-based National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). The nonprofit, designed to operate a network of ecological observatories across the continent, is solely funded by the National Science Foundation.

The report found that spending at the group has gotten out of control.

"Given the present lack of controls, there is virtually no accountability over the contingency funds ... NSF does not have sufficient safeguards over the significant and unsupported contingency costs included in NEON's award budget," the report said.

The report, and the spending, was the subject of a House science committee hearing Wednesday morning.

Among the spending was a slew of items billed to the National Science Foundation between mid-September 2012 and mid-April 2013, under a so-called "management fee." They included the lavish Christmas party, the coffee services, $3,000 for alcohol-fueled Board of Directors dinners, $3,000 for T-shirts and more. It also included $112,000 for lobbying, according to the report. According to a whistle-blower document, the Christmas and holiday party costs included more than $12,000 for expenses at a Westin.

"Why did NSF allow this to happen?" Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said Wednesday at the hearing. "The NSF needs to be held accountable for how they spend taxpayers' hard-earned dollars."

Though it wasn't in the IG report, Smith also alleged trips to a "high-end resort in France."

Asked for comment, an NSF spokeswoman said the agency has initiated a review of "management fee policies and controls."

"Consistent with government-wide regulations that govern audit resolution, NSF has policies and procedures for resolving and following up on and recommendations contained in audit reports issued by the Office of the Inspector General," the spokeswoman said, adding the agency will post its final decision online.

NEON Board Chairman James Collins also defended the organization. "NEON, Inc. has always spent all funding in strict compliance with our understanding both of the guidelines provided to the organization and the law," he said in a statement.

The audit stemmed from concerns dating back to 2012 over a NEON construction budget, where more than $150 million in costs were questioned.

This is not the first time the NSF has come under scrutiny for its spending.

In 2011, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., released a report on wasteful spending at the NSF, identifying more than $1.2 billion in losses from waste, fraud, duplication and mismanagement.

This included an $80,000 study on why the same teams always dominate March Madness; $1 million for an analysis of how quickly parents respond to trendy baby names; $2 million to figure out that people who often post pictures on the Internet from the same location at the same time are usually friends; and $581,000 on whether online dating site users are racist.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/12/03/audit-taxpayer-dollars-paid-for-eco-groups-25g-christmas-party-and-more/

[Dos Equis]

Feds spend $33G to find out if same-sex couples live close to tobacco shops
By Elizabeth Harrington
Published December 23, 2014
Washington Free Beacon

The federal government is spending over $33,000 to figure out whether same-sex couples live closer to tobacco retailers, theoretically making them more likely to smoke.

A National Institutes of Health (NIH) project, entitled, "Relationship Between Tobacco Retailer Density and Sexual Minority Couples," reasons that since many gay and lesbian couples live in cities, they may be close to stores that sell cigarettes, such as 7 Elevens.

"Tobacco use is substantially higher among sexual minorities than among heterosexuals," the grant states. "The reasons for this persistent disparity remain unclear, but the high toll of death and disability from tobacco use creates substantial health inequalities in cancer."

"Same-sex couples' movement within the U.S. results in same-sex couples concentrating in more urban neighborhoods where there may be more tobacco retailers," the grant continued. "Living near a tobacco retailer has been associated with decreased success in quitting tobacco. The presence or absence of overlapping patterns of same-sex couples and tobacco retailers have not been explored."

The $33,341 study is cross-checking a "high quality list" of nearly 100,000 tobacco retailers from 97 U.S. counties with census data to determine whether same-sex couples live nearby.

"Sexual minorities are more likely to use tobacco products than heterosexuals," the grant said. "The reasons for this disparity are unknown; however, where people live and their proximity to tobacco retailers can influence decisions to quit smoking."

Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.

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