Homeland Security agency spends big on silk plants
All righty then! While we wait in lines for 2 hours at Dulles airport for some barely trained dumbass to tell us that we're only allowed two books (mistaking reading books for books of matches, of course) and our underwire bras may be a threat to national security, they spend 1/2 million on trappings. So.... how many more SCREENERS could they have hired for 1/2 a MILLION dollars? How many DC school children would have contributed art work for the walls of the place for NOTHING? I guess I'm just some kind of idiot but I doubt that this is the only agency in Washington spending this kind of money on crap. How much closer to a balanced budget would we be if real people rather than government appointees took a look at these budgets and said "huh" when someone wants to spend a couple million for a fitness center, and a 1/2 million for yard sale fodder?
Homeland Security agency spends big on silk plants | News.blog | CNET News.com: "Looks like there's no room for drabness while fighting the war on terror at the Transportation Security Administration. The agency, charged with protecting U.S. transportation to a post-9/11 mandate, burned through half-a-million dollars buying silk plants, art and other decorative items for the new Transportations Security Operations Center, according to a scathing letter sent by lawmakers to the head of the TSA. The splurge on knickknacks for the center--which houses a 42,000-foot fitness center--was slammed in the letter, written by Sens. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins in response to a report by the Homeland Security Department's inspector general on the facility. Pointing to 'endless citations of wasteful spending,' the lawmakers took the TSA to task for haphazard decision-making, saying: 'That lack of attention extended throughout the project such that TSA still cannot account properly for expended funds.'"