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Dirty Little Secret

By Demosthenes | March 20, 2009

I’ve retired from two careers.  One from the U.S. Air Force and another as a successful businessman.  I was blessed to have the opportunity to do both.  Since my retirement(s), I’ve taken up consulting, some of which has me bidding on government contracts that interest me and ones where I feel I can contribute something positive.  The opportunities that interest me are typically rare, but when they come along, I like to feel like I made good use of the taxpayer money that funded the projects.  The three most recent contracts I’ve worked on have dealt with promoting entrepreneurism in our community and state.  All of them will hopefully yield a positive return on investment of the taxpayer funds that paid for them.

Since the passing of the Stimulus package, I have already seen a glut of offerings of contracts, using taxpayer funds, to supposedly promote growth.  The dirty little secret is how these contracts are let and managed.  In all cases, they are managed by low level bureaucrats that define the requirements in whatever way they want to define them.  At least in one instance so far, I’ve seen these bureaucrats get infuriated because we dared to make efficient use of the money.  That’s right, we turned back in $80,000 on a $400,000 grant and we were chastised for doing it.  “You have to spend it all!  Figure out how.”  On another contract proposal, we were advised to bring in some other organizations with “name recognition,” to give the project credibility.  When we told them the institution they recommended automatically adds 40 percent to all of their contracts for “administrative overhead,” they said.  “So be it.”

Now, there are literally hundreds of these projects flooding the “market.”  I just read a proposal for a project to “subsidize youth employment.”  It’s a 30 page request for proposal, and it allows a total of two weeks to prepare the response to spend $1.4 million!  In just one town.  This is going on all over the country.  While these projects may have some merit, they will waste taxpayer money at an alarming rate.  And if there were even a slight chance the funds might contribute toward growing our economy, it will be frittered away by the bureaucrats that manage the contracts.

This is precisely why relying on the government to fix our economy is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Topics: General | 66 Comments »

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