Monkey balls and peeping into hotel showers: A Flake off the old block

Compendiums of federal waste have a long, proud history. My own recollection goes back to the Golden Fleece awards from the late Senator William Proxmire, a blueblood Democrat. He inaugurated these monthly gems back in 1975. In those early days they made the evening TV news (back when people watched it).

Like Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz). did this week, Proxmire often took aim at seemingly absurd scientific activities funded or conducted by the federal government. Flake patterned his effort, though, not after Proxmire but instead after former Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn.

Flake has come up with familiar themes. There’s a million dollar, NIH-funded study of small monkeys placed inside exercise balls and rotated slowly on treadmills. Some of them threw up or pooped inside their balls.

Some examples are more serious. The book includes a summary of a Housing and Urban Development inspector general report. It states HUD could spend nearly a half-billion dollars a year subsidizing rents for people not meeting the requirements of the subsidy program, while large numbers of qualifying people wait in line.

Then there’s the item about shower monitors. No, not peeper creepers. EPA gave a grant for developing a wireless device to gauge how much water hotel guests use during showers and letting them know, on the premise that people would waste less water once they’re told the amount. Not a lot of money here: $15,000 to the University of Tulsa.

But wait! Didn’t Oklahoma Senator Jim Lankford (R- Okla.) also release a list of 100 wasteful government projects just days earlier? Indeed, Lankford  dubbed his “Federal Fumbles.” Some of the items are listed in both reports. Lankford’s report is shorter at 145 pages. Flake’s runs to 286 pages.

I know what you’re thinking. Why rehash existing information, with a patina of indignation on top, using staff man-hours and other resources? Isn’t that a form of waste and, in this case, duplication? I guess so. The books do make fun reading, and they do manage to portray some of the absurdity that creeps into an organization as vast as the government.

My problem is that the effort is froth. Institutionally Congress is unable to make much of a dent in wasteful spending — spending that erodes the efficiency of the government and its ability to do well those things it is supposed to do. Medicare and Medicaid waste a dollar or so in five because of fraud. Vast sums —billions and billions — go to politically connected farmers of sugar, corn and other commodities. Why don’t they try and fix some of those things?

One of the great anecdotes in the 1973 bestseller “Upstairs at the White House” by former Chief Usher J.B. West, comes to mind. At some White House gathering in the 1940s, before the Truman-era renovation, the White House was showing its shabbiness. The stern (and cheapskate) housekeeper to the Roosevelts, Henrietta Nesbitt, looked up and commented negatively on cobwebs clinging to a chandelier.

Mr. West strongly implies Mrs. Nesbitt was the housekeeper! It was her job to go after the cobwebs in the first place.

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