The Department of Homeland Security is the mother of all boondoggles and a monumental testament to the fleecing of American taxpayers. Not only has the agency – formed ostensibly to prevent another 9/11 – engaged in flagrant abuses of power but should be the first target of any who truly want to reign in big government. The mission of DHS has expanded exponentially to include harassment of airport travelers and most recently raiding a Kansas City boutique to confiscate women’s underwear. Now according to an investigative report the government goon squad has been busted for sucking down thousands of dollars in Starbucks lattes on the taxpayer dime.
According to a story from the website of Washington TV station News 4 entitled “Federal Government Made $20 Billion in Secret Purchases in Recent Months”:
The federal government has spent at least $20 billion in taxpayer money this year on items and services that it is permitted to keep secret from the public, according to an investigation by the News4 I-Team.
The purchases, known among federal employees as “micropurchases,” are made by some of the thousands of agency employees who are issued taxpayer-funded purchase cards. The purchases, in most cases, remain confidential and are not publicly disclosed by the agencies. A sampling of those purchases, obtained by the I-Team via the Freedom of Information Act, reveals at least one agency used those cards to buy $30,000 in Starbucks Coffee drinks and products in one year without having to disclose or detail the purchases to the public.
A series of other recent purchases, reviewed by internal government auditors, include wasteful and inappropriate purchases by government employees -- including a gym membership and JC Penney clothing -- that were not detected or stopped until after the purchase was completed.
The I-Team’s findings have been the subject of a Congressional hearing and created scrutiny from taxpayer watchdogs for the Department of Homeland Security, which made the Starbucks purchases and declines to publicly detail them.
A “micropurchase” is a purchase costing less than $3,000 in which a government-issued purchase card is swiped. The U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Defense, each made tens of millions of dollars of “micropurchases” in the past year, according to an I-Team review. But each agency said it does not make public an itemized list of its transactions, limiting the information to internal government reviewers and users of the federal Freedom of Information Act.
The Washington Post has also picked up the story at “Report: DHS employees put $30,000 worth of Starbucks on government credit card”. This will likely offend a lot of the tax dollar sucklers who are feeding off the government teat in the D.C. area - one of the wealthiest in the entire land - and have grown fat as hogs off of their war on terror profiteering.
History shows that when a government goes rotten that those who are enabled to act as enforcers engage in using their positions of privilege to steal from the people. This is especially so with whatever remains of the remnants of our once free country that has become ever more putrescent under the regime of President Barack Obama and his cronies. But this is truly a bipartisan problem in that none of the loudmouthed, parasitical members of Congress will dare to upset the apple cart by exercising oversight over DHS. Is it any wonder that the U.S. Congress has popularity ratings hovering somewhere in between genital herpes and pedophilia?
Homeland Security thugs are not quite at the level of the actual Gestapo, NKVD, SAVAK or Stasi quite yet but the signs are increasingly evident that we are headed in that direction unless there is an intervention very soon.
Let the pigs pay for their own damned coffee. It is especially galling that they choose Starbucks which is much pricier than McDonalds or 7-11 and all involved should be subject to disciplinary action.
No comments:
Post a Comment