Now, we're all familiar with "overspending" and graft at the TSA, but this is a bit excessive. The Washington Post details

a federal audit that calls into question $303 million of the $741 million spent to assess and hire airport passenger screeners for the newly created Transportation Security Administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

I'm not so good at math, but that's something like 40% of the total spent on things like,

· $526.95 for one phone call from the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Chicago to Iowa City.

· $1,180 for 20 gallons of Starbucks Coffee -- $3.69 a cup -- at the Santa Clara Marriott in California.

· $1,540 to rent 14 extension cords at $5 each per day for three weeks at the Wyndham Peaks Resort and Golden Door Spa in Telluride, Colo.

· $8,100 for elevator operators at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan.

· $5.4 million claimed for nine months' salary for the chief executive of an "event logistics" firm that received a contract before it was incorporated and went out of business after the contract ended.

The audit found "a consistent theme of a failure to follow federal contracting rules for documenting and justifying charges and cost increases." All of this happened while Bush & Co. gutted worker's rights claiming that allowing TSA and other employees of the Homeland Security to be union members would raise costs and make it difficult to ensure quality and thus safety.

Other eye raising expenses include:

$20-an-hour temporary workers billed to the government at $48 per hour, subcontractors who signed out $5,000 in cash at a time with no supporting documents, $377,273.75 in unsubstantiated long-distance phone calls, $514,201 to rent tents that flooded in a rainstorm, $4.4 million in "no show" fees for job candidates who did not appear for tests.

Ahh...the efficiency of privatization. Now you might be thinking that, "well they had to have the interviews and testing someplace right?" And you might be thinking that hotels are notorious for over charging for mundane things, right? And you be right, except the company, NCS Pearson Inc., has some 925 "private assessment centers" scattered across the country. Sure there may have been some scheduling conflicts, but some how or another the decision was made to move all of the TSA-related interviewing and testing to hotels. In Pearson's bid for the contract they said they would use their "private assessment centers" but someone at the TSA must have realized that doing so wouldn't provide much opportunity for graft and decided hotels would be better. And I say "apparently" because there is no paper trail about the decision and the TSA official Pearson says ordered the change now works for a private company that does business with the TSA.

Pearson tries to wrap itself in the flag and says that all of the costs were necessary because of the need to protect the American public. Just remember that the costs we paid, including phone calls "'made in the late hours of the evening to residential numbers after normal work hours (past 10:00 p.m.),'" (I guess Pearson doesn't issue cell phones to its employees) were the result of federalizing the hiring of airport security. That's right Bush & Co. "federalized" the program and the proceeded to sub-contract the work right back to the private sector that had done such a good job of protecting the American public in the first place. I mean what good is a war if you can't profit from it?

posted by Idle Crank at 6/30/2005 11:24:00 AM