We started yesterday with the first post which covered such diverse and distressing topics as how the Federal government spent nearly half a million dollars on a project to teach fish survival skills, how the Fort Hood terrorist shooter is still being paid his salary while those that were gravely affected by his actions have received nothing, how GSA employees get to set their own performance bonus monetary payouts, etc. Insanity.
We continue today with the following idiocy:
1) Recent reports have come to light on how another half million dollars or so of taxpayer wealth from the failed stimulus program was wasted on a useless program. As you read the details about the following travesty, remember that the whole purpose of Obama’s economic stimulus program was to create an immediate environment that facilitated immediate worthwhile jobs:
- The University of Central Florida (UCF) received $434,812 beginning in 2010 for a project to test a “mixed reality game for Latina middle school students to they are better to resist peer pressure to engage in sex.
- The stimulus program was called, “Using Mixed Reality to Build Peer Resistance Skills in Latina Middle Schoolers."
- According to the grant description” “This study will test a prototype for a game that builds the skills that Latinas need to resist pressure to engage in intercourse when they are in middle school, thereby decreasing their risk for teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Study results will also be helpful to other researchers developing technology-based health games designed to promote health.”
- The project has been completed, according to Barbara Abney, director of marketing and communications at UCF: “Forty-four low-income early adolescent Hispanic girls took part in the study, which included peer resistance skill curriculum followed by specially developed, technology-assisted, social interaction game play.”
- According to Recovery.gov, the website for tracking stimulus funds, the project created 0.91 jobs. Yes, over $400,000 of taxpayer wealth was spent to “create” less than one job.
- The program’s managers claim that “several” part-time positions were created over the project’s two-year lifespan which included two research assistants, a part-time project manager, four positions for people who worked less than 60 hours a year and two high school student research assistants.
- The most insulting result of this waste is the TEMPORARY creation of less than one equivalent full time job for over $400,000.
- This was obviously not a shovel ready job that improved infrastructure or that enhanced the lives of many Americans, it was a vanity project for an academic study.
- Even if you think this was a worthwhile effort, it was a very, very limited study of a very, very limited sample size in a very, very limited geographic area. To think that this poor research study will apply to all Latina middle school girls is a fallacy.
2) KPAX TV in Montana reported on May 1, 2013 that robbers broke into a secure United States Forestry Service bunker in Montana and stole about 559 pounds of high explosives. Material stolen include emulsion-type explosives, explosive cast boosters and detonating cord.
The ATF issued a press release asking for the public’s help in finding the robbers and missing explosives. In other words, they probably have no idea who or how this happened. Thus, for all of the tens of billions of dollars we give the Federal government every year to protect us from criminals and terrorists, the government cannot securely lock up a quarter ton of explosives.
Lord knows whose hands these explosives are in now and what their plans are. Hopefully, those who walked away with a quarter of a ton of explosives do not use it to kill the very Americans who paid to have these types of things kept out of the hands of evil.
3) We have always maintained that the Federal government had gotten so large that it was largely ineffective in anything except wasting taxpayer wealth. It is now like Jabba The Hutt from Star Wars fame: a large, obese shapeless glob that takes and devours resources via intimidation and provides no societal benefit.
In fact, in light of the many, many scandals swirling around Washington and the Obama administration, this might actually be true. All of these calamities are going down and the best that Obama can come up with is that he did not know of them until he heard of the scandals on television, the same time the rest of us heard. David Axelrod, a former leader of Obama’s election campaigns, came out recently and said the same thing, the Federal government is just too large to be managed or be effective.
And now, the Federal bureaucracy has admitted that it cannot track or catalog all of the Federal agencies and organizations, there are just too many. By law, the Federal government is required to know about and document EVERY Federal entity. The Law is known as the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) which President Obama signed into law on January 4, 2011.
The law requires quarterly performance assessments of ALL government programs, and also mandated that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) create a website that was supposed to publish quarterly performance reports by the heads of every agency.
The website, Performance.gov. was launched in 2011 but two years later contains only a partial list of government programs. The list is so bad that even a major government organization, the Federal Communications Commission, is not on the list or on the website
Although GPRAMA required that there be a standardized and uniform process for entities to report their strategic and performance plans, that process does not exist two years later. Some organizations report heir results in PDF formats while others use XML or StratML.
There isn’t even a uniform standard about how strategic and performance plans data is published, something GPRAMA also mandated. Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute was quoted by the Daily Caller as saying that not only isn’t there a list of Federal agencies that exists, but that there’s no standard machine-readable federal government organization chart or report format.
The House of Representatives passed yet another law to standardize GPRAMA reporting requirements in 2012. However, the bill died in the Senate and the thus, the effort to standardize reporting and document the entire Federal bureaucracy will continue to be another disastrous Federal government program. Jabba The Hutt lives on, parading as the Federal government bureaucracy.
Jabba The Hutt, lost explosives, and another failed economic stimulus program. Seems just about right for what we call the Federal government of the United States. More lunacy tomorrow.
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
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Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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