Picture this: you're a government bureaucrat who just came into
nearly $10 million in federal funds, with few strings attached.
Your mission: help veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan
transition back to civilian life.
Your first order of business? Give half your full-time employees
six-figure salaries, bankroll extensive travel for the top brass,
pay an out-of-state consultant hundreds of thousands for
"critical thinking" (including typing up and distributing your
newsletter), and subsidize expenses for your deputy director to
travel between her residence in northern Virginia and her office
in central North Carolina.
Also, ensure scant oversight of your employees and virtually no
accountability from those higher up the food chain for how you
spend your funds. Oh, and produce few deliverables to justify
your pricey taxpayer outlay.
This isn't a fictitious scenario, sad to say. Several media
outlets are now reporting about the Citizen Soldier Support
Program, an initiative housed by the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. It's funded, in part, by a $5 million
federal earmark obtained
by North Carolina U.S. Rep. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat.
Price, you'll remember,
was one of 75 House members recently to vote against
de-funding ACORN.
The News & Observer of Raleigh picked up
the issue after the publication I work for, Carolina
Journal,
broke the story late last month. So far, the program has
burned through much of its $10 million appropriation, leaving
about $2.5 million in a reserve account -- and they have little
to show for it.
Reports the N&O:
Half of the eight full-time employees are paid more than $100,000
a year, including a deputy director who has been reimbursed
$76,000 for food, travel and lodging when she commutes from her
home in northern Virginia to North Carolina.
An internal review found that the program produced reams of
paperwork but few concrete results.
"The program has produced volumes of documentation, but the
vast majority of this documentation is devoted to conceptual
verbiage about how the program will function," the review said.
"The CSSP is vulnerable to the accusation that it spends too
much money on administrative overhead and low-priority,
‘nice-to-do' activities and not enough time on activities
directly relevant to its mission."
SNIP
The deputy director for military relations, Susann Kerner-Hoeg,
earns a salary of $129,600. Kerner-Hoeg works from her home in
northern Virginia, and the program pays for her travel, lodging
and meals when she comes to Chapel Hill. The program has spent
$76,558 over the past three years for Kerner-Hoeg's flights,
rental cars, hotel rooms and meals.
During the same period, the program paid $313,600 to Kent
Peterson & Associates of Kansas City; KA. Peterson, a
consultant, served as the director of community relations.
It's examples like these that bring the issue of wasteful
government spending home to the average American's kitchen table.
