When a scandal like the GSA’s $823,000 trip to Las Vegas comes along, you see that it takes truly risible details, like an actual clown in attendance, to move the outrage dial in Washington.
I mean no disrespect to anyone else’s outrage about the sushi bar, the mind reader, the commemorative coins or the professional photographer to document it all. Feel free to remain outraged over those details. What’s truly outrageous, however, or at least depressing, is that in scandals like this, too often we get all the maddening details but none of the satisfying consequences.
In the case of this scandal at the General Services Administration, heads actually rolled. Your run-of-the-mill boondoggle, of which there are hundreds in government, doesn’t get anyone fired. It is normally done in plain sight: Photographs of boondoggles and junkets decorate the walls of many a bureaucrat’s office.
In 2008, after there were rumblings about a crackdown on jaunts, the Drug Enforcement Administration hauled its employees to Istanbul — would Sin City have sent the wrong signal? — for $1.18 million. Back in the US, the Justice Department decided that a single-day conference on sex offenders could only be done justice in Palm Springs, Calif., at a cost of $90,201 — or $626 per person.
A shelf in the office of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) groans under the dozens of reports he has done on ridiculous government expenditures (he has documented more than $200 billion in overlapping and duplicative programs) and more than $200 million in silly conferences.
Little happens, Coburn explains, because Congress is “numb to stupidity and waste,” treating everything as just one more Bridge to Nowhere. Congress is bored by oversight. It prefers to plant flowers in the form of new programs, not do the hard work of pulling weeds in the old, bloated and frivolous ones.
Coburn, the spiritual godfather of the Tea Party movement who is leaving the Senate at the end of his term, points out that his amendments to limit government trips are failing by fewer and fewer votes. He finds this heartening. Maybe so. Myself, I prefer outrage.