Your tax dollars at work: Here's what they were doing at that blowout GSA conference in Vegas

Four days, 300 people, $823,000 in taxpayer money down the chute (including $146,000 in catered food and drink, i.e. $486 per person for eats), which means the agency “followed neither federal procurement laws nor its own policy on conference spending.” The bad news: According to Darrell Issa, the White House knew about this 11 months ago but didn’t do a thing about it until the press found out about the conference earlier this week. Since then, as guestblogger Steve Eggleston noted on Tuesday, the top administrator at GSA has resigned, two of her top aides were canned, and four regional managers have been placed on leave. The good news: Sounds like the conference was super fun, featuring a clown, a mind reader, and the man you see below, who chose the right song for a parody about pissing away lots of federal cash and not worrying about any flack from the Inspector General. Turns out he was wrong on that last point, but if not for the recent media attention, he probably wouldn’t have been. And the punchline? GSA’s mission is to help other federal agencies “foster an effective, sustainable, and transparent government for the American people.” In other words, they’re supposed to make big-government bureaucracy more efficient. So, naturally, they blew upwards of a cool mil on a big party with ponies and magicians or whatever.

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The first half of the clip is from the employee’s parody vid, the second half is of GSA leadership rewarding him for it. And now that we’ve dispensed with a freak-show case of exorbitant federal spending, go look at this vastly more important graph from CBO about the trajectory of Obama’s DOA budget. Remember, it’s conventional wisdom on the left that America’s defense budget is ludicrously higher than it needs to be. And yet, even if you hold defense relatively steady, Obamanomics would lead to a national debt so enormous that interest payments on it would soar past defense within the decade. But it’s Paul Ryan who’s crazy.

Update: Via BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, I’ve added a second clip below fully in keeping with the theme of absurd recklessness in spending.


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David Strom 8:00 AM | November 07, 2024
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