Snuggies, Shakespeare top annual government wasteful-spending list
WashingtonTimes: If Shakespeare is performed without the bard’s immortal words, is it really Shakespeare?
The National Education Association has committed $10,000 of taxpayers’ money to test that question — one of dozens of projects to make the wasteful spending list of Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who’s continuing the tradition of former Sen. Tom Coburn’s annual Wastebook.
The National Science Foundation again comes in for an outsized share of criticism for its research spending, including a $1.8 million grant to a university that spent some of the money on embroidered Snuggies, the robe-style blankets that are a staple of As-Seen-On-TV trinket advertising.
NSF officials also paid $315,000 to study whether Americans see the court system as fair, Mr. Lankford said in his second annual “Federal Fumbles” report.
“Our current spending habits are unsustainable and irresponsible,” Mr. Lankford said in releasing the report, which documented more than 100 areas where he said the federal government botched its spending decisions.
The silent Shakespeare grant Mr. Lankford highlighted is actually a repeat-performance. The senator’s first report in 2015 also cited the NEA for funding the Synetic Theater’s attempt to convert verbal witticisms into expressive gestures. This year’s production was “Twelfth Night.”
Mr. Lankford said the theater company may be doing good work, but it should stand on its own, not with taxpayer money.
He said Congress and the executive branch need to spend more time scouring spending. He said one step toward that would be to enact the Grant Reform and New Transparency (GRANT) Act, which would give the public more information about the grant process, which accounted for some $617 billion in federal spending in 2015.
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Example:
X CONFERENCE: Spending
X TEAM: Immigration and Customs Enforcement
O FUMBLE: $6 million to repair a building that remains unsafe
O HOW TO RECOVER THE BALL: ICE should conduct a cost-benefit analysis and a feasibility
study before renovating an existing building, where the cost could exceed $1 million
Talk about a tale of woe! In San Pedro (essentially Los Angeles, CA), ICE used a former
Service Processing Center to house detainees until it had to close due to safety concerns. Then
ICE decided to move employees back into the building while it processed and held illegal
immigrants temporarily.
X CONFERENCE: Spending
X TEAM: National Institutes of Health
O FUMBLE: $2,658,929 weight-loss program for truck drivers
O RECOVERY: Congress should develop clearer expectations for areas of research for NIH
The American economy is powered in no small part by the thousands of trucks on the road
each day. It is certainly important for individuals behind the wheel of giant 18-wheelers to be healthy. But do taxpayers really need to spend more than $2.6 million on a trucker weight-loss intervention program?
