And you wonder why we’re so fed up with our politicians and the bureaucracies they allow to flourish within our government? That’s right, OUR government, the one we pay for with OUR taxes.

From The Washington Guardian

The D.C. DOES program was supposed to spend federal dollars helping find jobs for the unemployed, but instead wasted $8.8 million on excessive salaries, rent and other unrelated costs

A District of Columbia program misused $8.8 million in federal funds that were supposed to help the jobless find work, diverting the money instead to overpay bureaucrats or cover unrelated overhead expenses, investigators found.

The grants provided by the U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) were designed to support employment programs and unemployment insurance. Instead, officials at the DC DOES program couldn’t keep track of their own expenses, investigators said.

“D.C. DOES did not have sufficient controls and processes in place to ensure costs claimed for ETA grants were adequately supported by the general ledger and were reasonable, allocable, and allowable as set forth in federal cost principles,” the Labor Department’s inspector general general declared in a recent report.

Investigators analyzed $25 million the D.C. program received in federal grants and found that roughly a third of it had been wasted. But their sample size was just part of the $89 million D.C. DOES received between 2008 and 2011.

That’s okay, Uncle Sam, just keep providing plenty of Bread & Circuses.

Nothing like a government that has our back when it comes to responsible guardianship of the taxes they collect from us, and well they should be, since that money is our money.

They should, in fact, be paying exceptionally close attention to how they dole out our money these days, considering all the hype we get regarding the dreaded “sequester”…

Energy Department approves lavish bonuses: $3.5 million to 10 workers alone

Ten contractors are on pace to collect $3.5 million in excessive bonuses due to a lack of oversight, investigators warn

Federal employees are facing unpaid days off and salary cuts due to the sequester, but several contract workers inside the Energy Department are still raking in the cash.

Ten individuals at the department’s operations in Oak Ridge, Tenn., are set to make an extra $3.5 million above and beyond their normal pay, according to an Energy Department inspector general investigation that exposed a lavish bonus system.

The operations in Tennessee include a national laboratory, a security site, and a former uranium enrichment facility that is being cleaned up. The contractors are involved in what is known as the East Tennessee Technology Park, where the cleanup work is going on. (An earlier version of this story incorrectly mentioned the lab as being connected to the contractors.)

The 10 people are executives at the company UCOR, which the department hired for environmental clean-up. And despite watchdog warnings that the executives’ salaries are as much as 82 percent above the market rate, Energy Department officials continue to pay out the bonuses.

The entire article is here, in The Washington Guardian.

Yes, indeed, it’s great to know our taxes are being well spent.

The National Science Foundation awarded a grant for $876,752 to the University of Iowa to study whether there is any benefit to sex among New Zealand mud snails and whether that explains why any organism has sex.

The study, first funded in 2011 and continuing until 2015, will study the New Zealand snails to see if it is better that they reproduce sexually or asexually – the snail can do both – hoping to gain insight on why so many organisms practice sexual reproduction.

“Sexual reproduction is more costly than asexual reproduction, yet nearly all organisms reproduce sexually at least some of the time. Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs,” the study’s abstract asks.

We’ll have the answers to that and more, just a few short million dollars of our tax money down the road…

What a deal, what a deal!

We import illegal aliens from Mexico,while we spend the taxpayer’s money to export manufacturing jobs to….Mexico!

From CNS News

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has granted uniform contracts to VF Imagewear, Inc., an apparel company that relies on manufacturing sites in Mexico for a “significant percentage” of its occupational garments.

The latest contract with the company was awarded on Dec. 20, 2012, to make “uniform and insignia items” for the CBP at an estimated cost of $6,157,997.57, and a ceiling of $8 million.

The CBP, which is responsible for protecting America’s borders, told CNSNews.com that items from VF Imagewear, a subsidiary of VF Corporation, are manufactured in a number of locations, “including Mexico.”

So let’s get this straight: The tax payer funded Border Patrol, one of whom’s main jobs is to prevent illegals coming up here from Mexico, a country whose government has been singularly uncooperative in helping us staunch the flow of criminal aliens both through and from their sovereign soil, allows Mexico to profit from the manufacture of their uniforms, and the taxpayer who pays for this is essentially compensating employees in the country south of the border rather than providing work for Americans in a time of obscenely high unemployment.

Meanwhile, the same illegals whom the Border Patrol is tasked to stop (while hampered by the party in power in Washington at the moment) come into the United States and take jobs cheaply at the cost of taxpaying Americans working.

What a deal, what a deal!