Wasteful Government Spending Week - TSA Screws Up Again

This is a second in a series of posts regarding recent instances of wasteful government spending. Yesterday, we reviewed the continuing insult to American taxpayers relative to House of Representatives members having the American taxpayers pay for free auto leases for a subset of those politicians, many of whom lease luxury cars.

The purpose of the posts this week is to review what I call "random wasteful spending" that exists throughout most, if not all, of the Federal bureaucracy. This is different from what I call "systemic wasteful spending" that is anything but random. Systemic wasteful spending occurs everyday, every month, every year, in the same manner, almost like clockwork.

Examples of systemic wasteful spending have been reviewed many times in this blog, based on official and credible sources:

• Social Security loses over $100 million every year through waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
• Medicare loses between $70 and $90 billion every year through waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
• Medicaid loses $40 and $60 billion every year through waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
• Just one Federal unemployment program loses about $19 billion every year through waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
• The IRS fails to collect almost $400 billion every year in taxes that are legally owed to the Federal government by tax evaders.

This systemic fraud goes on and on and on. But random wasteful spending is no less important. It happens once or twice as the opportunity arises. Other recent random wasteful spending insults to the American taxpayer include the following atrocities:

1. General Services Administration personnel threw themselves a giant party in Las Vegas, a party that was thinly disguised as a conference, wasting about $832,000 of taxpayer money while doing skits that mocked those same taxpayers.
2. The State Department spent about $80 billion to build a consulate in northern Afghanistan and THEN decided that the location and the building that was supposed to house the consulate could not be adequately protected from Taliban and terrorist attacks.
3. The most viewed post in this blog reviewed how the U.S. Navy  spent about $300 million to build two new Navy ships and THEN decided that they were not needed and spent another $10 million to scrap the two ships that were never used.
4. The Obama administration has wasted a ton of taxpayer money by handing out Federal grants, loans, and loan guarantees to a whole spectrum of alternative energy companies (Solyndra, ENER1, Spectra, Beacon, etc.), making these expenditures fall into the random wasteful spending category since most of these alternative energy companies have already gone bankrupt or out of business before they could become systemic wastes of money.

Which brings us to today's main topic of random wasteful spending, courtesy of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). We have often talked about the ineptness of the TSA in this blog, citing numerous examples of where TSA employees have failed to do their job in screening out dangerous situations that could have resulted in catastrophic airline disasters or where other TSA employees were caught stealing from travelers luggage or using their clearances to smuggle drugs and other contraband through the airlines network.

However, today's waste is not centered on field TSA employees but rather the upper management staff of the TSA. According to recent news reports:

• The Huffington Post reported on May 5, 2012 that the TSA had purchased thousands of pieces of security equipment at a  taxpayer cost estimated at about $184 million, equipment that was supposed to be installed at airport checkpoints to screen airline passengers. 
• Unfortunately, that $184 million worth of equipment is collecting dust in government warehouses, a finding that came to light at a recent joint Congressional panel investigation.
• Adding insult to injury, not only is the equipment not being used, the Congressional panel found that 85% of 5,700 unused security units are being stored at a TSA warehouse facility in Dallas at an annual storage cost of $3.5 million.
• About 85 percent of the approximately 5,700 pieces of security equipment was stored for longer than six months; 35 percent had been stored for more than one year. One piece of equipment had been in storage more than six years.
• There were 472 carry-on baggage screening machines in the warehouse, 34 percent of which had been stored for longer than a year.
• The committee estimated the delayed deployment of TSA equipment "has resulted in a massive depreciated loss of equipment utility at an estimated cost to taxpayers of nearly $23 million."
• TSA had 1,462 explosive-trace detectors worth nearly $44 million in storage, far more than it could use in the 463 airports where TSA provides screening operations. When asked why the agency bought so many, agency officials testified they needed that many in order to get a discount, i.e. the "more you buy, the bigger the discount" theory of procurement even if you do not need the extra ones you bought to get the discount. Insanity.
• The Congressional investigation found that the TSA storage facility tried to hide about 1,300 pieces of screening equipment from Congressional investigators by giving  Congressional staffers a list of disposed items "that falsely identified disposal dates and directly contradicted the inventory of equipment." Great, lying to Congress in addition to wasting taxpayer money.

Three observations on this random act of wasteful spending. First, there is obviously a lack of inventory control here combined with a lack of good forecasting skills. Any successful organization knows how to put forth a good business plan that forecasts and anticipates its future asset needs and budgets and spends accordingly.

This does not appear to be a characteristic of the TSA. They appear to have been either bad forecasters of their needs or bad procurers since they obviously have massive amounts of unused and expensive equipment laying around idle. For this inability to efficiently operate a budget and an organization, someone needs to be fired at the TSA and replaced with professional inventory managers.

Second, I found the reader comments interesting relative to the Huffington Post article. Democrats blamed Bush since the TSA organization was created during his term. Republicans blamed Obama since the waste of $184 million was uncovered three and a half years into his administration. And that is a wider problem than $184 million of waste. As citizens we end up fighting among ourselves, blaming the other political side for whatever weekly government screwup that comes by.

Unfortunately, as we focus on blaming each other, the weekly screwups continue unabated and the political class never gets called to task. While I find it difficult to blame Bush for the waste so far into this administration, does it really matter who is to blame? If it is Bush's fault, remember that Congress was controlled by Democrats in the last two years of his administration and did nothing to change the waste mentality of Washington. Obama has been President for a long time and obviously systemic and random wasteful spending still occurs at horrific levels.

Regardless of blame, why don't we just focus on fixing the problem? That is the right course of action rather than expending so much energy yelling at each other. We need to hold the political class accountable and the Federal bureaucrats responsible for the rampant waste.

We can hold the political class responsible by implementing Step 34 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Step 34 would remove politicians from their committee and subcommittee posts for not performing the duties required of that committee. In this case, any politician sitting on the Congressional committee responsible for this TSA screwup would lose their committee post and be replaced by some one else who might be a little more diligent in the jobs.

If this Step was in place, I would bet that Congressional oversight would be more extensive and effective since I doubt any politician wants to be publicly removed from a committee post. "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" suggests some processes that could be used to put this procedure in effect.

I see no other way of getting Federal bureaucrats in line other than to make an example of some of the non-performers by just firing them. It happens in real businesses, exceed reasonable inventory requirements with outlandish expenses of excess equipment, get fired. Do the same in government positions with taxpayer money, get fired. I would bet that like Step 34, if you make an example of a few bureaucrats, most of the others would step up their diligence in their job performance.

The first glimmer of hope in this area occurred when high ranking TSA officials were fired for misspending $832,000 of taxpayer money on their luxury Las Vegas party. If wasting $832,000 of taxpayer money gets Federal bureaucrats fired, I can see not excuse for not firing TSA bureaucrats who wasted $184 million, 221 times as much than the TSA waste.

Final observation, we need to implement term limits for every Federal politician, "one and done."  If systemic and random wasteful spending has gone on for multiple Presidential administrations and various configurations of Congress, maybe it is time to get rid of the long term members of the Washington political class and replace them with people that would actually care about how taxpayer money is spent.

Certainly seems like a better idea than continuing to yell at ourselves, solving nothing. Regardless of who is to blame, let's just fix the problem before we run out of warehouse storage space.

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/