A Typical Example of Government Waste

We rely on the Centers for Disease Control every day. They operate in a continuous cycle tracking dangers that the rest of us, thankfully, only have to think about on rare occasions.

Yet, when salmonella breaks out across the country, the CDC is there to help track the disease's footprints. Who is going to trace Ebola if it breaks out here? Who has the expertise to truly assist should the country be attacked biologically?

Few people question the legitimacy of the Centers for Disease Control. It helps to fulfill an obligation that government has to protect the citizens. However, departments such as the CDC should not be allowed to operate irresponsibly just because they have a legitimate charter.

Given the importance of its mission, particularly in a day of potential bioterrorism, the agency's $10 billion budget seems entirely appropriate.

But for at least 18 months now, the CDC has been the focus of congressional pressure, charged with waste, mismanagement and questionable judgment. In June 2007, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), himself a medical doctor, compiled negative press reports and combed through the CDC's budget in an effort to highlight what he sees as agency excesses.

The CDC spends vast sums in off-budget money, according to Coburn. Some $440 million it takes in to run the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief never shows up on the agency's budget.

The CDC's new $106 million communication and visitor center in Atlanta includes accouterments such as a 70-foot-wide, 25-foot-high wall of plasma TVs, a $20 million production studio in its communication center and a $20,000 fitness center.

A report put out by Coburn's office also criticized the CDC for sponsoring an erotic-writing class and a "Flirting 101" seminar at a CDC-funded AIDS-fighting office in San Francisco. Another CDC-funded group hired a gay porn star to make a promotional appearance at a "safe sex" event in Memphis.

Between 2000 and 2005, the CDC spent $44.7 million on conferences, according to numbers reported in response to congressional inquiries. Coburn and other critics dislike the fact that the CDC has spent millions more pushing for gun control, advocating for youth health and advising TV networks on how to put accurate information into programming.

Of course there is a CDC spokesman ready to defend all of these expenditures.

It is not just that many Senators and Representatives have lost touch with economic reality (although that is certainly a problem too.) A much larger problem is that a nearly infinite number of agencies are so huge and poorly managed that a presidential appointee will have almost no opportunity to ever weed out a significant portion of the waste. Most administrators and managers of these behemoth agencies are not elected or appointed. They are lifers and their attitudes are ingrained.

That agencies can count on an increase in budget year after year only helps to perpetuate these wastes. Government agencies, due to their ever expanding budgets, rarely have to take a hard look at cutting back the dollars of programs that are ineffective or simply wasteful in nature. They are spared the uncertainty of revenue ebbs and flows associated with business life the real world.

If an agency had to take a 2% hit from a previous year's budget, would porn stars stay on the payroll? If CDC officials were forced to consider sponsoring a flirting class out of their own money, would they still justify the expense? Would a new visitor's center sport 1,750 square feet of plasma televisions on one wall?

Rhetorical questions, I suppose, to anyone not working for the federal government.