New York - The Hurricane Katrina cleanup will cost a lot of money--$82 billion and counting.
Much of that expense, of course, is warranted, as Katrina left in its wake 77 million cubic yards of debris, enough to fill 250 football fields with a 50-foot-high stack of wreckage.
But much of the spending isn't justified. In fact, it's not just government contractors cleaning out taxpayers' wallets but government bureaucrats who are exploiting the ka-ching that is Katrina.
Federal officials are porking out on more than $15 million worth of all sorts of unrelated goodies for themselves, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. "That's just the tip of the iceberg, as government auditors continue to dig and discover more and more waste," says Stephen Ellis, a senior official with the government pork watchdog group in Washington, D.C.
The last time we heard about this behavior was the $640 toilet seat and the $7,000 coffee pot the U.S. Defense Department was blowing taxpayers' money on two decades ago.
After all, these are taxpayer funds being used--not like Dennis Kozlowski's Sardinia birthday party for his wife, where shareholders footed the bill. Kozlowski went to prison for that one.
Millions of tax dollars are going toward pricey, new, top-of-the-line laptops, handheld devices, sporting goods and even steak knives shaped like scimitars.
Call it the "No Bureaucrat Left Behind Act." Even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gets a new $15 million museum, despite the fact that this is the agency that designed and built the levees that failed and submerged New Orleans beneath a devastating flood. A Corps official says he hadn't heard about the museum. The Federal Emergency Management Agency didn’t return calls for comment.
"We've heard for decades about waste and graft in Louisiana," says Ellis. "But what's surprising about Katrina is that government bureaucrats are using the recovery effort to take items for their own personal aggrandizement."
He adds, "Bureaucrats should not run amok, wasting desperately needed Katrina dollars on their every whim and desire, but that's what's been happening."
Most New Orleans residents still shake their heads about how slowly the government has reacted to the catastrophe that all but destroyed the heart of their city, which is still in the very earliest stages of the rebuilding process. Only last week did the first major demolition of flood-ravaged homes begin in some of the most heavily affected sections.
Besides being the most financially devastating hurricane in history, Katrina is also shaping up as a landmark in government pork. It's one of the few cases where high-level government guilt quickly created a fertile breeding ground for government waste.
A White House official told Congress that, in order to repair the Bush administration's image after its embarrassingly lackadaisical response to Katrina, the plan was to toss money at the problem.
"Nothing can salve the wounds like money," a White House aide said, according to Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. But "spending money freely" means "you are severely injuring the taxpayers from whom that money came and doing nothing at all to help those who need help," Dorgan says.
