A Personal Example of Government Waste

"Hey, let's have a conference!"




"Ja. I vasted government money, but I vas only following orders."


In the light of the news about the Social Security Administration's convention in Phoenix, I thought I would add a personal anecdote when it comes to government waste. As I have written many times, I am retired from the US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration. Most of my years were spent on the streets and overseas. However, my last 5 years were spent at the DEA Office of Training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va. It was there that I personally experienced an example of government waste of the tax-payer money.

First, a little background information is in order. DEA, aside from its enforcement role, is also involved in training state and local drug law enforcement officers, as well as foreign cops overseas. Those training programs are coordinated both out of Quantico and in DEA's regional field offices, each of which has an assigned training officer. Since a regional office, like say, St Louis, may cover more than one state, that training officer is responsible for organizing training programs within his or her geographical area. The funding comes from Washington/Quantico.

In 1990 or 1991, when I was working in the Office of Training, I was assigned to the State and Local Training section. At that time, someone in the higher echelons came up with a brilliant idea. Operating with a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (an agency in Washington that gave money to law enforcement programs), it was decided to have a national conference in Washington, in which state and local training officials from the principal training academies of every state would be invited to discuss........

STATE AND LOCAL TRAINING NEEDS

Guess who was assigned to be the coordinator of this monster? Yeah, little ol' me.

Aside from the fact that it was a bureaucratic nightmare, most of us worker bees couldn't see the need for it for one main reason I'll mention later. At one point, my boss told me I'd better get off my ass and get moving on this project fast.

So I reached out to all the regional training officers around the country, invited them to participate and to identify and invite a couple of appropriate officials from each state in their jurisdiction. I also had to arrange the conference site/hotel for lodging as well as arrange the funding for the invitees. In short, it was a nightmare.

When the conference took place, we had about a hundred people from every state. We divided them into working groups according to their geographical locations (southeast, southwest, etc). They were assigned to identify their major.....

TRAINING NEEDS

By this time, many of the attendees were starting to catch on that this was a giant boondoggle. They couldn't see what the goal was and wondered if the government had a hidden agenda (which it really didn't). It was very difficult for me to answer their questions since I was the principle representative for DEA-and I knew the conference was unnecessary. In addition, I was placed in a very uncomfortable situation regarding the opening reception since we were officially prohibited from furnishing alcohol with tax-payer money. (Entertainment funding is tightly controlled.) Yet, it was naturally expected that a reception would have drinks, right? The solution would have been to doctor the paperwork, which would have put me in a delicate situation. Anyway, I resolved it in a legal manner.

It was during that conference that one of the regional training coordinators pulled me aside and said,

"Gary, why didn't you just assign us all to reach out to the people in our area, give them a questionnaire and send it back to us? We could have saved you all this time and expense."

My answer?

"I know that. I was following orders"

"I VAS ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS".

So, at the end of the week, we came up with some "ideas" and enough information to write some kind of a report. We then decided to have a follow-up conference a couple of months later in Chicago to be attended by about 5 representatives of the geographical groups.

So off I went to Chicago (again paid for by the Bureau of Justice Assistance). We had about 2-3 days of meetings and decided on one or two ideas that might be implemented, which concerned academies sharing teacher resources in particular subject matters. It actually was my idea because I figured it was the only positive thing that might come out of this whole endeavor.

So we went back to Washington. I wrote up a report with my recommendation and sent it over to the Bureau of Justice Assistance with a request for funding.

Some time later, I followed it up with a phone call to the Justice Assistance Coordinator. When I told him who I was and what I was calling about, he said,

"Oh yeah. Whatever happened to that project?"

At that point, I gave him a recap and asked him if we could get money to fund the exchange of instructors between various academies who needed that instructor's specialized expertise.

"No, I don't think we don't have any more money for that project."

So that was it. A hundred people came to Washington from all over the country. Ten of them went to Chicago, and in the end, nothing came out of it. All we had to show was a thin pamphlet my boss wrote up with a bunch of pie charts and other filler-more filler than a bad sausage. Last I saw, a couple hundred copies of that report were sitting in a box in our warehouse gathering dust.

Oh yes. Total cost to the tax-payer?

$250,000. (But don't blame me. I vas only following orders.)

Anyway, I hope the reader will keep this little anecdote in mind as we debate the idea of turning everything in our lives over to the government.

God, I've wanted to get that story off my chest for a long time.