Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has released a report detailing 100 examples of waste in the "stimulus" – the trillion dollar spending and debt package President Obama and Congressional leadership touted as "must-pass-or-else" legislation.
As we predicted, the package has failed to deliver in the area of job creation although the administration continues to try to move the goal posts by using the arbitrary metric of "jobs saved/created." There is littlle oversight and taxpayers haven’t seen much of the promised "unprecedented level of transparency yet."
And the money is also clearly not spent – as the administration had claimed – "without waste, without inefficiency, without fraud."
Here’s the top ten list of wasteful programs according to Coburn’s office:
- $1.5 million in “free” stimulus money for a new wastewater treatment plant results in higher utility costs for residents of Perkins, Oklahoma.
- $1 billion for FutureGen in Mattoon, Illinois is the “biggest earmark of all time” for a power plant that may never work.
- $15 million for “shovel-ready” repairs to little-used bridges in rural Wisconsin are given priority over widely used bridges that are structurally deficient.
- $800,000 for little-used John Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pennsylvania airport to repave a back-up runway; the ‘Airport for Nobody’ Has Already Received Tens of Millions in Taxpayer dollars.
- $3.4 million for a wildlife “eco-passage” in Florida to take animals safely under a busy roadway.
- Nevada non-profit gets $2 million weatherization contract after recently being fired for same type of work.
- $1.15 million for installation of a new guard rail for the non-existent Optima Lake in Oklahoma.
- Nearly $10 million to renovate an abandoned train station that hasn’t been used in 30 years.
- 10,000 dead people get stimulus checks, but the Social Security Administration blames a tough deadline.
- Town of Union, New York, encouraged to spend a $578,000 grant it did not request for a homelessness problem it claims it does not have.
See for yourself how this package that was rushed through Congress without giving lawmakers or the public an opportunity to actually read the bill is wasting taxpayer dollars. Click here to read Sen. Coburn’s report.