50 Examples of Government Waste

The Heritage Foundation offers a list of 50 Examples of Government Waste (link via Club For Growth), including a $2.6 million grant to train Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly on the job and the $73,950 that a recent audit showed had been billed to Air Force and Navy credit cards for services at "exotic dance clubs and prostitutes." There's also the $998,798 that the Pentagon spent "shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas." There's plenty of waste, fraud, and abuse in the private sector, too, and given the size of the federal budget, it's expected there would be some in the government. Some of the examples on the Heritage list are examples in which the system worked, and the waste was caught by internal government auditors or law enforcement. Still, it's hard not to shake your head in exasperation at some of these examples. The interesting thing now is that it isn't just the political right that thinks there is a lot of waste in government; President Obama is going around claiming that Medicare is full of "hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud." These arguments are often made by those calling for a reduced government role in the economy, but now they are also made by those advocating an expanded government role in the economy.