Outrageous Government Junkets at Taxpayers Expense
How outrageous? $1.4 billion worth of outrageousness. At RealClearPolitics, Michelle Malkin documents “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.” She adds that “(s)pending on bureaucracy boondoggles has increased some 70 percent in that time period.” One example was a HUD “trip to the resort town of Los Cabos, Mexico for a conference on American real estate and urban areas.” Or HHS sending a delegation of 236 to an AIDS conference in Barcelona, Spain -- price tag was $3.6 million.
Ms. Malkin points out that we know about these junkets because U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) directed federal bureaucrats “to document their conferences, meetings and travel expenses since 2000.” She writes that when Sen. Coburn tried “to limit conference spending by just one agency – HUD – (it) was anonymously stripped from an appropriations bill behind closed doors and unceremoniously killed.” Reducing that $1.4 billion sounds like as good a place as any to begin achieving a smaller federal government.
UPDATE 2/10/06. Additional details about these junkets are available at Government Bytes, the blogsite of the National Taxpayers Union. Elizabeth Terrell also provides a link to the U.S. Senate subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Tom Coburn (R), including his opening statement as well as statements by several agency representatives.