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Thanks to GOP, Washington’s Summer Spending Spree Has Started

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Washington’s summer spending spree is off to a very bad start for taxpayers.

Congress couldn’t agree on a budget deal earlier this spring, but that isn’t stopping them from passing spending bills at historic levels. And President Barack Obama is fully engaged in budget gimmickry as well.

The good news is that the majority of voters across the political spectrum are opposed. The bad news is that Washington doesn’t appear to be listening. (For more from the author of “Thanks to GOP, Washington’s Summer Spending Spree Has Started” please click HERE)

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Cromnibus Moves Forward: $1.1T Bill Financing Government Crosses First Hurdle

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Photo Credit: Greg Nash

Photo Credit: Greg Nash

by Associated Press

Republicans have muscled a $1.1 trillion bill financing government agencies through the House after President Barack Obama phoned Democratic lawmakers and urged them to back the measure.

The House approved the measure late Thursday by 219-206.

The compromise bill keeps agencies funded through next September.

Many conservatives opposed it because it did not block Obama’s recent executive actions on immigration.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Omnibus Bill Keeps Welfare Spending at Massive Levels

By Rachel Sheffield

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty. Since that time, annual means-tested welfare spending has increased by 16-fold, now costing taxpayers nearly $1 trillion a year. And the omnibus bill keeps spending at this sky-high level.

The means-tested welfare system is massive and is the fastest growing part of government spending. The federal government currently operates roughly 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and social services to poor and lower-income Americans. Nearly one-third of Americans receive benefits from at least one of these programs.

Food stamps is one of the largest of the welfare programs. Its cost has jumped dramatically over the last decade or so, doubling from less than $20 billion in fiscal year 2000 to about $40 billion in fiscal year 2007. By fiscal year 2012, costs doubled again to nearly $80 billion. The omnibus keeps food stamp spending at historically high levels: $82 billion.

Read more from this story HERE.

BLM to Spend $10M on Contraception for Wild Horses, Burros

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Photo Credit: AP / Pat Sullivan

Photo Credit: AP / Pat Sullivan

The Bureau of Land Management announced it is planning to award 10 grants of up to $1 million each for wild horse and burro contraception and sterilization for up to five years.

“The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program protects, manages, and controls wild horses and burros under the authority of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 to ensure that healthy herds thrive on healthy rangelands,” the grant announcement said.

“Development of effective population growth suppression methods for wild horses and burros is vital to effectively managing herd population growth rates as an alternative to gathering and removing animals from BLM lands,” it added.

“Any sterilization or contraceptive method applicable to male or female horses or burros, including surgical, chemical, pharmaceutical, or mechanical (such as Intrauterine Devices) approaches, will be considered (with the exception of surgical castration),” the grant solicitation said.

In 1971, when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, these animals were found roaming across 53.8 million acres known as Herd Areas, of which 42.4 million acres were under the BLM’s jurisdiction.

Read more from this story HERE.

Watchdog: State Department Can’t Fully Account for $6B Worth of Contracts

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The State Department has a “serious” problem accounting for how it has spent billions of dollars on contracts all over the world, according to the official watchdog that oversees the sprawling department.

The Office of Inspector General, in a March 20 “management alert” to department leaders, said the department has failed to provide all or some of the files for $6 billion worth of contracts in the last six years.

“The failure to maintain contract files adequately creates significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the Department’s contract actions,” the memo said.

This apparently is not a new or isolated problem. The memo said investigators and auditors have found “repeated examples of poor contract file administration” and have called this one of the department’s “major management challenges” for several years.

The alert cited one example where contracting officials could not provide dozens of files for contracts supporting the U.S. Mission in Iraq. The value of the contracts in the missing files? $2.1 billion.

Read more from this story HERE.

TSA Spent $900 Million on Behavior Detection Officers Who Detected 0 Terrorists

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Photo Credit: APThe Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spent approximately $900 million over the last 5 years for behavior detection officers to identify high-risk passengers but, so far, according to the General Accountability Office (GAO), only 0.59% of the passengers flagged were arrested and among those not one was charged with terrorism – zero.

In 2003, the TSA started testing its Screening of Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT) program, which was then fully deployed in 2007. About 3,000 behavior detection officers (BDO) “had been deployed to 176 of the more than 450 TSA-regulated airports in the United States” by fiscal year 2012 (Oct. 1, 2011 – Sept. 30, 2012), according to the GAO.

Those BDO officers are trained to “identify passenger behaviors indicative of stress, fear, or deception and refer passengers” and their baggage for additional screening, reported the GAO in its Nov. 8, 2013 report, Aviation Security: TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities.

Since 2007, the TSA has spent approximately $900 million on the SPOT program, said the GAO.

During the SPOT screening, the TSA’s behavior detection officers are supposed to look for and identify “high-risk passengers based on behavioral indicators that indicate mal-intent,” said the GAO. The BDOs can refer the passengers to a law enforcement officer (LEO) for further investigation. From there, if warranted, a passenger (or passengers) can be arrested.

Read more from this story HERE.

Government ‘Mining’ Social Media for Information on Health Behavior

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Photo Credit: APThe National Library of Medicine (NLM) is “mining” Facebook and Twitter to improve its social media footprint and to assess how Tweets can be used as “change-agents” for health behaviors.

The NLM, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), will have software installed on government computers that will store data from social media as part of a $30,000 project announced last week.

“The National Library of Medicine is the world’s largest biomedical library and makes its stored information available online at no charge to consumers, health professionals, and biomedical scientists through a diverse suite of resources,” the agency said in a contract posted on Oct. 23. “Evaluating how its databases and other resources are utilized is an important component of continuing quality improvement and has long been an on-going program of NLM management through a potpourri of monitoring tools.”

“The world-wide explosion in the use of social media provides a unique opportunity for sampling sentiment and use patterns of NLM’s ‘customers’ and for comparing NLM to other sources of health-related information,” the agency said.

“By examining relevant tweets and other comments,” the contract said, “NLM will gain insights to extent of use, context for which information was sought, and effects of various health-related announcements and events on usage patterns.”

Read more from this story HERE.

‘Cupboard is Bare’? Despite Claims, Feds Find $100M to Give Detroit

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The Obama administration has found $100 million to send to struggling Detroit, despite recurring claims that the government cannot afford to make any more spending cuts.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi claimed just last weekend that “there’s no more cuts to make.” Pelosi made the comments in response to Republicans demanding additional cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

“The cupboard is bare,” she told CNN.

Apparently not completely bare.

Gene Sperling, chief economic adviser to President Obama, told the Associated Press the administration scrounged through the federal budget and found untapped money that “either had not flowed or had not gotten out or not directed to the top priorities.”

That money is now being sent to Detroit.

Read more from this story HERE.

Study: Billions Utterly Wasted on Obama’s Global Warming Jihad

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Photo Credit: Reuters As President Obama last month launched a sweeping new national program to combat “climate change,” including tens of billions of dollars in likely new subsidies for solar and wind power and bio-energy, a separate, groundbreaking study by the National Research Council has warned that those kinds of subsidies are virtually useless at quelling greenhouse gases.

The study, which looks at the subsidies and other incentives embedded in U.S. federal tax law after the past several years of climate change initiatives, concludes that they have done little or nothing so far to cut U.S. contributions to global carbon emissions, and are unlikely to do much more before 2035, the project’s research horizon.

The two-year, $2 million probe was the first of its kind undertaken to examine the relationship between U.S. tax provisions, a key tool of U.S. climate change policy, and the actual reduction of greenhouse gases.

The pioneering nature of the study itself speaks volumes about the murkiness of official knowledge concerning how well government can tweak the global thermostat by trying to radically reorient energy production and consumption in the U.S. economy.

It was carried out by a 12-member National Academy of Sciences panel of economists, energy experts, environmentalists, tax specialists and climate scientists backed by consultants wielding powerful computerized economic models and a sizeable handful of National Academy of Sciences staff.

Read more from this story HERE.

NIH Spends $3 Million To Study Health Risks of “Dating” Mexican Prostitutes

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Photo Credit: APJust how dangerous is it to your health to shack up with a Mexican hooker? That’s the question at the heart of a five-year, $3,029,663 study by researchers at the University of California San Diego funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The five-year study is taking the first-ever look at the love lives – and sexually transmitted diseases – of 200 prostitutas mexicanas and their “non-commercial” male partners.

Based on previous research, UCSD scientists have been able to determine conclusively that the “non-commercial male partners” of Mexican prostitutes are very likely to pick up and spread their partners’ sexually-transmitted diseases, and may in fact be “significant drivers of HIV/STI acquisition and/or their re-infection.”

Begun in 2009, the Mexican prostitute study has already been receiving federal funding of over half a million dollars annually, and the $3 million price tag does not include the as-of-yet undetermined 2014 grant for the study’s final year.

Read more from this story HERE.

Holder Living High on the Hog, Too: Spent Almost $1.5 Million on Travel in 2011

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Photo Credit: ReutersU.S. Attorney General Eric Holder took 62 out-of-town trips in fiscal year 2011 at a cost of at least $1.45 million, according to a set of disclosures sent to Bloomberg News.

Holder’s travel during the period included an April 2011 trip to Las Vegas, marked business and personal, that cost $46,358. Nine other trips, including visits to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and Miami, were labeled “personal,” and cost a combined $169,502. He took an $83,002 flight to Krakow, Poland, to attend the G-6 summit.

Flight costs for seven trips, including journeys to China, Hawaii and Brussels, weren’t provided.

As attorney general, Holder is a “required use” official who is compelled by executive order to use government aircraft for all travel while in office due to “security and communications needs,” according to a February 2013 U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

For personal trips, Holder is required to reimburse the government for the equivalent commercial coach fare, which is often much less than the total trip costs, the GAO said.

Read more from this story HERE.