While our President Non-Elect may contend [among a wide variety of unlikely contentions] that we are winning his personal 'War Against Terrorism', several government agencies have been extremely busy losing and/or spending everything on which they can get their greedy little paws.  For the benefit of anyone who might have spent the last decade in an isolation tank, we offer a few recent examples:

The Army -- No surprise here ... any entity operating under the auspices of the Pentagon need look no further for a role model on how to waste, misuse, or otherwise toss around public funds, while treating the idea of any investigation into their monetary practices as the equivalent of treason.

Still, one would think someone might have raised at least one eyebrow when charges to government credit cards, generously provided to Army personnel for travel purposes, began including excessive 'restaurant charges'.

By the time the GAO got around to questioning this surge in soldier dining habits, some 200 card-users had rung up $38,000 in what turned out to be cash they spent on 'lap dancing and other forms of entertainment' at strip clubs near military bases.  It seems the clubs charged a 10% fee to supply the soldiers with cash, billing their travel cards for the full amount as a 'restaurant charge'.

Far be it from me to deny our armed forces fun in their leisure hours, but what even the most magnanimous taxpayer has in mind probably doesn't include lap dancing, and we really don't want to know what those 'other forms of entertainment' might have been.

The GAO also suddenly discovered that the government cards had been used to buy some $100,000 worth of computers & other electronic equipment, finance $45,000 worth of cruises, and pay for such crucial army necessities as fine china, cigars, wine, casino gambling, and [my personal favorite] two pictures of Elvis Presley purchased at his Graceland mansion in Memphis.

Presumably some dire shortage of Army transportation necessitates  issuance of credit cards to soldiers for travel purposes ... although why cruise ships would be employed is stretching it a tad ... but it does verge on subsidizing temptation when our tax dollars pay out $2.1 billion for 1.4 million defense employees' travel card charges, and a whopping $6.1 billion for 230,000 Defense Department workers to use for 'goods and services' that relate about as much to 'defense' as the Pentagon relates to the idea of accountability.

The Justice Department -- This season's top Loser's Award goes to these guys for 'losing track' of 775 weapons and 317 laptop computers, more than half of which may have contained national security or sensitive law enforcement information, although the FBI inspector general, in a pathetic attempt to reassure us, opines that 'it is impossible to determine' if the lost equipment contained such information.

It seems the FBI had not taken a complete inventory of laptops and weapons in almost a decade, despite agency policy requiring one every 2 years, but they decided to give it a shot [if you'll excuse the expression] when other agencies, including the INS, reported large numbers of missing weapons.  We all know how the FBI hates to be upstaged.

Quickly rushing to its own defense, the Justice [Not for All] Department attributed these losses to 'faulty paperwork & tracking', an alarming excuse considering the nature of what we presume FBI activities entail.

It was suggested that some of the equipment may have been loaned to other government agencies ... relegating the problem to the status of your neighbor borrowing your lawnmower and never getting around to returning it ... or that it may still be in possession of government employees who apparently consider taking home a few weapons on a par with liberating office post-its.

There was no explanation of how some weapons, recovered after they were used in armed robberies, left the possession of their original owners.

Other losers under Justice Department jurisdiction: The Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service reported a combined total of 24 missing weapons. The Marshals Service was missing 56 laptop computers, and the Bureau of Prisons lost 27 [has anyone done a cell search?], but the DEA couldn't provide the number of its losses due to 'unreliable data', making the futility of our 'War on Drugs' even more understandable than it already is.  [With considerable restraint, we refrain from making any connection between missing laptops and lap dancing.]

U.S. Customs Service -- More than 72 weapons and 2,000 computers have been lost or stolen from the U.S. Customs Service during the past 3 years, representing a replacement value of around $800,000.

As of fiscal year 2001, customs reported owning 39,799 computers & 29,106 firearms, each of which poses a 'threat to national security, public safety or ongoing investigations, if lost or stolen'.  Nevertheless, a spokesman insisted that there was 'no indication that classified information was lost'.

Less reassuring is the news that one recovered weapon had been used in a gang-related drive-by shooting.

And then there's the little matter of 613 U.S. Customs badges that have 'disappeared'.  While it was noted that these would cost $12,260 to replace, no one mentioned replacing the 613 officers who were stupid enough to leave them lying around.  Possibly, for reasons on which we would rather not speculate, they took them off while lap dancing.

The U.S. Forest Service -- These guys, expecting to spend a record of $1.5 billion this year to fight wildfires that have consumed more than 6 million acres in the West and killed 20 firefighters, managed to 'misplace' about $215 million intended for wildfire management because of an accounting error discovered by Taxpayers for Common Sense. According to this advocacy group, the $215 million was mistakenly reduced from a wildfire management account in late 2000.

The White House Office of Management & Budget [who knew there was one?] is working with the agency to find a way to apply the money to this year's budget so that it can be used to help pay for current firefighting efforts.  While this auditing error could make additional money available to fight fires this summer, a policy analyst for the taxpayer group said 'the misplaced millions could have been spent to reduce fire risk long before this year's fires ravaged the West.'

Over the past decade the Forest Service has failed 8 out of 10 Inspector General audits -- a record the taxpayers' group called among the worst in the federal bureaucracy.

They may not, however, hold the title for long. This wave of carelessness seems to be more infectious and sweeping the country faster than the West Nile Virus, with new 'losers' showing up every day.  The accumulated losses and/or misappropriations of just these four agencies alone would go a long way toward funding a national health plan, but we doubt any federal agency is ready to give up its perks [or even its losses] to subsidize the general welfare.

Meanwhile, lap dancing could become a very lucrative profession.

©sonya hammond, 2002

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