General Services Administration: Let the Taxpayers Eat Cake

The head of the General Services Administration, which is the federal government’s procurement and property manager, has resigned in the wake of a report from the agency’s inspector general that uncovered extravagant spending at a GSA “training conference” in Las Vegas.

Here’s the Washington Post’s summary of festivities:

Among the “excessive, wasteful and in some cases impermissible” spending the inspector general documented: $5,600 for three semi-private catered in-room parties and $44 per person daily breakfasts; $75,000 for a “team-building” exercise — the goal was to build a bicycle; $146,000 on catered food and drinks; and $6,325 on commemorative coins in velvet boxes to reward all participants for their work on stimulus projects. The $31,208 “networking” reception featured a $19-per-person artisanal cheese display and $7,000 of sushi. At the conference’s closing-night dinner, employees received “yearbooks” with their pictures, at a cost of $8,130.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle have been quick to express their outrage. In particular, Republicans are anxious to paint the affair as emblematic of the Obama administration’s fiscal profligacy.

Perhaps it is.

However, the scandalous abuse of taxpayer money by the GSA isn’t a partisan issue.

First, Martha Johnson is the second GSA chief to resign in the last four years. George W. Bush’s GSA chief Lurita Doan resigned in 2008 after a “tumultuous tenure in which she was accused of trying to award work to a friend and misusing her authority for political ends.”

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Second, bureaucrats have been wasting taxpayer money on conferences for years under the watch of both parties. For example, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) released a report in 2008 that found that federal agencies had spent over $2 billion on conferences from 2000-2006.

As the politicians trip over one another to make empty promises to end such abuses, keep in mind that Bureaucrats Gone Wild is what you’re going to get when you give human beings the ability to spend gobs of other people’s money.

The only sure way to stop government employees from wasting money is to stop giving them money in the first place, which means getting rid of the agencies that employ them. For the GSA, that means downsizing the federal government and thus reducing the need for its procurement and property services.