March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 5: Redundant Government Agencies and So Much Wasteful Afghan Spending

This is our fifth and likely last post this month in our monthly series nonpolitical class insanity. Our previous four posts again illustrated that the American political class is inept, wasteful, and unable to provide even basic services and good value for our taxpayer dollars. Insanity is the best word to describe why we as voters keep putting up with such nonsense.

Today’s insanity examples will be a hodgepodge of waste and ineffectiveness from a wide variety of government entities that are operated and led by the worse set of politicians to ever sit in the White house and Congress:

1) According to the Spendopedia website, in July 2013 the U.S. State Department Inspector General (IG) issued a damning audit report of the Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM) Office of Information Assurance. The overall conclusion is that the bureau, which is supposed to address information security, was wasteful, redundant and needed strict oversight. Specifically:

• The bureau failed to adequately track its $79 million in contracts. 
• The bureau failed to monitor its contracts and provide oversight on its purchases. 
• The bureau’s lacked a mission statement and overall purpose, as well as the fact that other offices within the State Department carried out similar functions. 
• But still, given the overlapping of its function and no defined purpose, it still spent $79 million a year for little added value.
• The agency's leadership and workforce includes 22 full-time employees and 36 contract employees. 
• The report said the agency was “not overseeing contracts effectively” and that “responsibilities…are assigned to individuals without the technical expertise to review the work." 
• The report and analysis offered 32 formal and four informal recommendations for how the agency could improve. 

$79 million wasted for an unneeded and ineffective government bureaucracy. Seems like that $79 million could feed, shelter, and clothe a lot of homeless or suffering Americans, far better uses than what the political class is using it for today.

2) Afghanistan has always been a rich area for government waste and incompetence. According to another Spendopedia report, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has financially worked with the Afghan Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) since 2008. The cost of this partnership is valued at $236 million USAID and MoPH which was budgeted under the "Partnership Contracts for Health" (PCH) contract. 

The objective of the contract was to deliver healthcare to local Afghan clinics and hospitals in Afghanistan's 18 provinces. This supports the Ministry's mission is to "improve the health and nutritional status of the people of Afghanistan in an equitable and sustainable manner through quality health services provision[s], advocating for the development of healthy environments and living conditions; and the promotion of healthy lifestyles." 

Nice mission and words, bad implementation. A report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has revealed rampant fraud and abuse within the program. Specifically:

• The $236 million figure was chosen based on a cost estimate developed by MoPH. The actual projected cost was never validated by USAID and documentation of the calculations were not provided by MoPH. 
• According to USAID internal control standards, a proper assessment should have been made to provide assurance that federal funds would be used as intended. 
• Although there were two assessments made in 2007 and 2008, a review by USAID's IG revealed in November 2010 that these two assessments were not adequate. 
• SIGAR also made the judgment that the two assessments did not meet the standards required by a formal assessment. 
• The report concludes USAID had not verified whether MoPH had taken any steps to remedy these problems or whether PCH was still a responsible program.
• SIGAR recommended the following: 1) USAID cut off funding until the cost estimates could be validated. 2) USAID work with MoPH to develop an action plan to address unaccounted funds. 3) USAID and MoPH return any excess funds to the U.S. Treasury. 

Just another typical government program. Suspicious cost estimates and budgeting, lousy follow up tracking and analysis, and another had scratching instance of why we are spending $236 million in a country that we will soon be leaving and which will revert back to Taliban control when there are tens of millions of Americans without health insurance that could have used the $236 million for their own medical needs.

3) Staying with Spendopedia and Afghanistan, on June 17, 2013, the Pentagon announced it planned to spend more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to buy helicopters and other aircraft for the Afghan Specials Mission Wing. Sounds like a sound military purchase on the surface until you find out that the Afghan aviation team and military had neither the skills nor the number of troops necessary to maintain the equipment. 

The Huffington Post commented on this idiotic use of taxpayer money: "These shortcomings mean the helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft destined for the Afghan Special Mission Wing 'could be left sitting on runways in Afghanistan, rather than supporting critical missions, resulting in waste of U.S. funds.'" The really sad part of the whole affair is that the Pentagon knew that the Afghan military was incapable of maintaining and using the aircraft but the Pentagon went forward with the purchase anyway. Insanity.

SIGAR also got involved in this Afghan spending disaster. Their findings conclude:

• SIGAR’s report concluded that the Afghanistan Special Mission Wing (SMW) lacked the capacity and skills to operate and maintain the existing and planned SMW fleets. 
• The SMW had less than one-fourth of the trained personnel needed to service the aircrafts. 
• SIGAR concluded that even if the Afghans were operating at full strength, NATO had no plan that identified how the SMV would achieve their goals and how they would address problems achieving those goals. 
• The purchases were made before the Afghan Ministry of Defense (MOD) and the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) had agreed on the way the SMW group should be controlled or structured. 
• The Inspector General determined the Pentagon had not developed a plan to transfer the maintenance instructions over to the Afghans and, still performed 50 percent of the maintenance of the helicopters.
• The report noted only seven of the group's 47 pilots were qualified to fly with night vision goggles, a skilled necessary to complete counterterrorism missions.

What a mess. Spending millions of dollars on stuff that could never be used by personnel that were not trained to use it. And knowing ahead of time that was the case makes it even worse.

But lets add insult to injury. The helicopters being bought that were never to be used did not come from an American manufacturer. At least if that was the case you could justify the spending to some degree in that it stayed in country and employed some American workers. But, alas, not true. The money was spent to buy RUSSIAN helicopters from a RUSSIAM manufacturer, Rosoboronexport. 

When the Congress found out about the Russian connection they passed a bill forbidding the purchase. However, the Pentagon went out of its way to do some accounting shenanigans to bypass the Congressional mandate to complete the Russian purchase anyway. Outrageous behavior that I would bet no one got fired over.

That's enough for today and for this month. We are sure to be back next month to continue our review of government insanity in all its forms. Today we found out that we spend tens of millions of dollars on a government agency that is unneeded and unprepared to do its redundant job, we found out how to waste medical resources in a country because the government has not accountability in assessing its own programs, and found that the Pentagon buys military equipment to be used in a foreign land by people untrained and incapable of using the equipment that we bought from Russian sources that will never be used.

Insane, wasteful, and plain stupid behavior by the American political class and the government it operates.

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