WHY WE NEED TRANSPARENT GOVERNMENT:

How good is government at wasting our tax dollars? Consider the Department of Homeland Security.

It’s not yet five years old, but it’s already experienced at throwing away cash. A recent congressional report found that 32 DHS contracts “experienced significant overcharges, wasteful spending or mismanagement.” Federal credit cards were used to buy beer-brewing equipment and iPods. Tax money was squandered on luxury hotels and “training” sessions at golf and tennis resorts.

Altogether, those contracts cost the government — meaning you and me — $34 billion. Sadly, a lot of that was wasted.

DHS says it can solve the problems — if it can hire more inspectors. “We need more,” Elaine Duke, the DHS chief procurement officer, told lawmakers. “We have an increase coming in the current ’07 budget of about 200 additional [workers], and we are working towards needing even more over time.”

But the answer isn’t to hire more bureaucrats to supervise what the current bureaucrats are doing. There’s a simpler, cheaper and more permanent solution: Allow 300 million Americans to review how government spends our money.

Meanwhile, it’s easy to see how dangerous things can be when you get corruption in national security matters. Just look at Israel:

The serious news is that the IDF’s reserve forces were a shambles when they mobilized. Information from an inside source reveals that, when the reserves’ warehouses and depots were opened, key stocks were missing – stolen.

What was gone? Fuel, weapons, ammunition, food, spare parts – all that a modern military needs to go to war. And I doubt it ended up in Iceland.

Trent Telenko speculated that this sort of thing was a problem earlier.