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The Daily Signal
See How Sen.
Jeff Flake Thinks Your Tax Dollars Were Wasted on These 100 Government
Programs
Philip Wegmann
December 09, 2015
As Congress presses further into its annual December budget battle,
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., launched the latest campaign in what he calls
his ongoing war on waste.
With the timely title “The Farce Awakens,” Flake’s 2015 Wastebook
highlights 100 government programs of questionable merit—such as the
millions in taxpayer dollars spent on sheep in microgravity, monkeys on
treadmills, and hipsters at parties.
“The message here is for those who claim we’re in a period of budget
austerity and that there’s no fat left to cut,” Flake told The Daily
Signal. “Just look in the book.”
Flake’s Wastebook takes its name from the upcoming and eagerly
anticipated seventh “Star Wars” film, “The Force Awakens.” The 205-page
publication chronicles examples that taxpayers may think range from the
humorous to the preposterous.
The National Institutes of Health’s “Help A Hipster” program uses $5
million to throw dance parties to encourage youths to quit smoking and
“take a stand against tobacco corporations.”
One participant, the Wastebook notes, “did it for the money” but says
he “knew I wasn’t going to quit.”
The U.S. Agency for International Development spent $2 million
promoting tourism in Lebanon, a nation the State Department has warned
Americans to avoid because of the risk of terrorism.
Flake’s Wastebook cautions Americans “to heed the warnings of the State
Department rather than the urgings of the USAID and avoid vacationing
in Lebanon at this time.”
In the book, available online, Flake writes that “despite the
ballyhooing over budget austerity, the government didn’t come up short
on outlandish ways to waste money in 2015.”
Since their passage in the Budget Control Act of 2011, spending caps
imposed by “sequestration” have been a favorite target for Democrat
frustration. President Obama and congressional Democrats have railed
against the spending caps as too low.
Sequestration budget cuts in 2013 don’t go nearly far enough, Flake
told The Daily Signal. He said his office is “just scratching the
surface of things we shouldn’t be spending money on.”
The Arizona Republicans blames much of the waste on the way Congress
does business during the appropriations process. During those debates,
Flake said, there’s little room for fiscal conservatives to maneuver
and cut frivolous spending. He said:
When there’s one big omnibus [spending bill], it is ‘pass it or the
government shuts down.’ Those of us who are looking for spending
discipline, we lose all our leverage.
Many of the programs are there to “just grease the skids” and enable
future spending, Flake said. Once approved, he said, university
programs tend to continue uninterrupted and without accountability for
their budget.
“Now, with a lot of these programs, we’ve authorized the spending,” he
said, “but we don’t conduct serious oversight.”
Romina Boccia, a federal budget expert at The Heritage Foundation,
hailed Flake’s effort to pinpoint waste. Boccia said:
From canceling tens of billions in duplicative spending to eliminating
corporate subsidies, lawmakers can live up to their commitment to
restrain spending. Now is the time to take a stance against the higher
spending levels and single out bad government programs for cuts. This
new Wastebook by Flake is one good place to start.
The pun-heavy publication is the most recent edition in Flake’s
anthology of profligate spending. In December of 2014, he released
“Science of Splurging” and earlier this year “Jurassic Pork.”
“We just try to find something topical and hitch the name to it to get
it noticed,” Flake said. “There’s an endless sources of bad puns that
can be made.
“The good ones are mine. The bad ones are [from] staff.”
Read this and other articles with links at The Daily Signal
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