CONSERVATIVE MONEY MANAGEMENT
TSA Lost Control of Over $300 Million Spent by
Contractor to Hire Airport Screeners After 9/11

From the Washington Post courtesy of Confined Space:

The money was spent in the name of improving security at the nation's airports:

· $526.95 for one phone call from the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Chicago to Iowa City.

· $1,180 for 20 gallons of Starbucks Coffee -- $3.69 a cup -- at the Santa Clara Marriott in California.

· $1,540 to rent 14 extension cords at $5 each per day for three weeks at the Wyndham Peaks Resort and Golden Door Spa in Telluride, Colo.

· $8,100 for elevator operators at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan.

· $5.4 million claimed for nine months' salary for the chief executive of an "event logistics" firm that received a contract before it was incorporated and went out of business after the contract ended.

Those details are contained in a federal audit that calls into question $303 million of the $741 million spent to assess and hire airport passenger screeners for the newly created Transportation Security Administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The audit, along with interviews with people involved in the passenger-screener contract, paints a rare and detailed portrait of how officials at the fledgling agency lost control of the spending in the pell-mell rush to hire 60,000 screeners to meet a one-year congressional deadline.

The audit, performed by the Defense Contract Audit Agency at the TSA's behest, spotlights scores of expenses: $20-an-hour temporary workers billed to the government at $48 per hour, subcontractors who signed out $5,000 in cash at a time with no supporting documents, $377,273.75 in unsubstantiated long-distance phone calls, $514,201 to rent tents that flooded in a rainstorm, $4.4 million in "no show" fees for job candidates who did not appear for tests.

Click here for the rest.

I think it's pretty safe to say at this point that conservatism as we know it no longer has any meaning. This is but one example of how our Republican dominated federal government continues to pour taxpayer dollars down the drain. When they were in the Congressional minority it was easy for them to rail away at what they saw as unreasonable expenditures such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or plain old fashioned Social Security. Now that they hold America's purse strings, they've found their own unreasonable expenditures such as massive tax cuts for the rich that don't stimulate the economy while continuing the same kind of wacky pork barrel stuff that their Democratic predecessors loved. Not to mention the billions of dollars wasted on an unwinnable war over what turned out to be nothing. The above excerpted story about the massive waste under Bush's TSA encapsulates clearly the reality that the business-oriented Republicans cannot seem to live up to their own stated principles of responsible fiscal policy. What do they stand for now, anyway?

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