‘Federal Fumbles’ Report Documents Government Waste

When Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) announced he was resigning from the Senate in 2014, it was a sad day.

Coburn was perhaps most noted for his annual “waste book” documenting wasteful government spending. His last was published in 2014.

Well, fear not all those yearning to learn about our federal government’s wasteful spending, for Coburn’s successor, Sen. James Lankford, has taken the mantle.

“Federal Fumbles: 100 Ways the Government Dropped the Ball” is Lankford’s version of Coburn’s waste book.

Like Coburn’s reports, “Fumbles” highlights bizarre spending items on the federal government’s books, but Lankford’s report also addresses imprudent tax credits and non-monetary federal government “fumbles”, such as Congress’s inability to pass legislation prohibiting sanctuary cities. Lankford is less caustic than Coburn and also proposes solutions to the errors and loopholes he identifies, which Coburn never did (the implicit conclusion from his waste books was to stop all such funding of the kind he was highlighting).

Some of the best worst examples of government waste in Lankford’s report:

The Department of Defense spent $250 million to train 60 Syrian rebels. It was originally authorized $500 million to arm and train 5,400. So far, it has spent $4 million per rebel and burned through half of its funding.

The Department of Defense issued a $283,500 grant to study the habits of a tiny bird species that lives in California.

The Department of Defense built a gas station in Afghanistan for $43 million. The project should have cost about $500,000.

A $683,600 program of the National Endowment for the Arts spent tens of thousands of dollars to fund silent adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet at a theater in the Washington, DC area.

The Department of Agriculture spent $35,000 to install solar panels in a brewery in Michigan. The panels will provide 7% of the brewery’s annual energy needs.

The National Institutes of Health spent nearly $2.7 million on weight-loss program for truck drivers.

The National Park Service spent over $65,000 to “demonstrate what happens to bugs when the lights go out”.

 
Unfortunately, there are many more examples, ranging from more grants to esoteric research and arts projects that don’t advance the national interest to abused and wasteful tax credits. Even Donald Trump finds himself on the bad end of the report, since his much-touted Washington, D.C. hotel received a $40 million credit, the national historic tax credit, from the IRS to turn the city’s Old Post Office into “one of the finest hotels anywhere in the world.”