Thread: Social Security Administration's big boondoggle in Arizona

Social Security Administration's big boondoggle in Arizona

Government conference spending gone wild!

By: David Freddoso
Commentary Staff Writer
08/25/09 6:35 PM EDT

Remember the last time your boss gave you the week off with pay and $1,800 to attend a training conference in another city?

You don't? You're obviously working for the wrong company. The federal government does this for its employees every year. And you're paying for it.

You may have read recently about the Social Security Administration's big boondoggle in Arizona. The administration, whose solvency is in dire condition, spent about $770,000 in early July to send, put up, and dazzle 675 of its managers with a multimedia presentation at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. The three-day conference included private dance recitals, paid motivational speakers, and an optional, non-government-funded casino trip, according to an investigation by a local Phoenix television station. (According to the report, a Social Security official described the gathering as a way for employees to reduce stress after a number of death threats against them.)

Government does this sort of thing more often than you may think.

Some government conferences are put on by private groups. In fact, the annual conference of the group Blacks in Government (BIG), is going on in Baltimore all this week. For years, BIG's conference has been officially certified by several federal agencies as a training activity, for which employees receive pay, free time off, and cash for travel, hotels and training costs.

For last August's BIG conference, the Department of Justice alone spent $288,000 to send 162 employees, according to agency information compiled by Republicans on the Senate Federal Financial Management Subcommittee. (DOJ was frugal -- in 2006, the State Department had spent $280,000 to send just 65 employees to BIG's conference.)

The 2008 event took place in New Orleans, and the keynote speaker was the recently indicted (and since convicted) Rep. William Jefferson, D-La. Some of the 2008 workshops taught bureaucrats to navigate the bureaucracy, and are at least sort of related to training for government work -- for example, "How to Win" when suing the government through an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint, or "How to Succeed (get Promoted) in Government." Many were self-help workshops on personal finance, maintaining one's credit rating, and "Starting Your Own Business Using Government Money/Buying Investment Properties."

Last year's BIG conference also included a "Healthy Soul Food Cooking" live demonstration and a workshop on "Dancing Your Way Through Stress."

This year's conference has once again been approved as training under federal regulations. It is lighter on culinary fare, but it features the same get-rich-quick-from-the-government workshop and much of the same self-help curriculum, with such offerings as "Favor Factor: Don’t Climb The Ladder, Let God Pull You Up!"

Even if their invitation to Jefferson makes them an easy target, BIG is really blameless in this matter. They're just holding a private conference. The question is whether multiple agencies of the federal government should be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars each in taxpayers' money to send people to it.

Nor is BIG even a big player in the world of government conferences. The Justice Department spent $311 million on conferences between 2000 and 2006. A group of 18 major federal agencies that includes Justice spent a combined $2 billion on conferences during the same period. Department of Defense was the biggest spender at $515 million, but others in the group include the Agriculture Department ($91 million), the Environmental Protection Agency ($104 million), the State Department ($164 million), and the Department of Health and Human Services (at least $349 million).

So what to do? Go get a federal job so that you, too, can get an extra vacation, paid for by your boss, on which you can learn how to cook, steer your way to a promotion, start your own business on the side, and improve your credit rating. Or, given yesterday's announcement of trillions in new federal deficits coming down the pike, perhaps just ask Congress to do something about conference spending gone wild.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opini ... 32242.html

Government at all levels has to waste money, so that Congress will approve a larger budget for them the next year. Private business watches the bottom line, while government watches income tax returns and drools when the Treasury prints more money.