There are many types of federal government waste. Perhaps the most glaring is spending on projects that simply do not work. The money is spent, but taxpayers receive no benefit.
Social Security officials have acknowledged that the agency spent nearly $300 million on a computer project that doesn’t work. The agency, however, is trying to revive it. The program is supposed to help workers process and manage claims for disability benefits.
Six years ago, the agency embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. But the project has been racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an internal report the agency commissioned.
As a wild guess, let’s say that skilled computer techs cost $150,000 a year in wages and benefits. Apparently then, about 333 of them have been paid for six years, yet have made little or no progress on this mishandled Social Security project.
Here’s a much larger taxpayer black hole, also reported in the Washington Post this week:
One of the first casualties was the Crusader artillery program, which was canceled after the Pentagon spent more than $2 billion on it. Then there was the Comanche helicopter debacle, which got the ax after $8 billion. More than twice that amount had been sunk into the Army’s Future Combat System, but that program got killed, too.
In all, between 2001 and 2011 the Defense Department spent $46 billion on at least a dozen programs—including a new version of the president’s helicopter—that never became operational, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Any organization will go down some wrong paths when it comes to advanced technologies, but $46 billion is a remarkable amount to have sunk into dead-end projects. Let’s say that engineers, machinists, managers, and other workers at defense firms earn an average of $200,000 a year. The $46 billion lost would be like having a small city of 23,000 such high-skill people beavering away for a decade on projects that all end up in the trash bin. I’m not an expert on procurement, but I do know that is a lot of human talent for the government to waste.
