That's how
much of our hard-earned money has gone to subsidize the spring
break-style trips and conferences of the federal government over
the last five years. Spending on bureaucracy boondoggles has increased
some 70 percent in that time period.
We wouldn't
know anything about this binge if Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., hadn't
asked. Last summer, the pork-busting chairman of the Senate Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial
Management, Government Information and International Security
surveyed all federal departments and agencies and directed them
to document their conference, meetings and travel expenses since
2000. At a hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Coburn unveiled his findings.
You'll be
happy to know that the government junkets your tax dollars have
funded include:
-- A Department
of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) trip to the resort town
of Los Cabos, Mexico, for a conference on American real estate
and urban areas.
-- Another
HUD outing to Honolulu -- for the Sacramento, Calif., Home Ownership
Fair.
-- A Department
of State expedition to Vienna, Austria, to partake in "7
Habits of Highly Effective People" and "Train the Trainer"
workshops.
-- A Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS) jaunt by 236 employees to an
AIDS conference in Barcelona, Spain. Price tag: $3.6 million.
-- A total
of 59 HHS conferences around the world with delegations of more
than 100 -- including over 1,000 attendees to sunny Orlando, Fla.
Employed by HHS? You're going to Disney World!
It would
be one thing if all this worldwide travel were actually related
to the actual agency/department goals and duties of the federal
employees packing their bags and riding off into the sunset. But
in too many cases, there is little if any connection between the
meetings and the mission.
Why are
we paying for HUD employees to attend the New York State Governor's
Dr. Martin Luther King Symposium? Or to a conference held by the
radical, left-wing, open-borders advocacy group, the National
Council of La Raza?
Did the
Department of Justice really need to dispatch workers to the "Women
Are Sacred" conference in sunny Phoenix?
Was it necessary
to send a whopping 200 HHS employees to a Netherlands "International
Symposium on Night and Shiftwork"? Wouldn't it have saved
us all time and money if the HHS researchers traveled to a nearby
7-11 or nursing home instead?
The spendthrift
HHS has been among the worst transgressors -- burning through
more than $300 million on conferences between 2000-2005. Several
of the department's publicly subsidized trips to AIDS conferences
have featured free condom distribution to participants, sex- and
drug-themed sessions, and in one case, giveaways of a map to area
brothels.
Jet-setting
bureaucrats do more than waste money on these working vacations.
They are also undermining our nation's best interests. The State
Department has sent its employees to confabs convened by a soft-on-terrorism
outfit, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (whose executive director
blamed Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks), as well as to a counterterrorism conference in Saudi
Arabia that deliberately excluded Israel and instead welcomed
the Islamist Muslim World League -- considered by U.S. counterterrorism
officials to be a financial supporter of al Qaeda.
Blowhards
in both parties in Washington have pledged to reduce spending
and reform business as usual. Yet, Sen. Coburn's attempt to limit
conference spending by just one agency -- HUD -- was anonymously
stripped from an appropriations bill behind closed doors and unceremoniously
killed.
Who did
it? Let's have some transparency. Step forward and tell us why.
You want
reform? You want smaller government? There's $1,401,104,263 and
counting just waiting to be targeted.
Go ahead
and make our day: Cut it out!
