Government Waste

I just happened to be in the Glendale neighborhood where Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich lives and noticed a big black Cadillac with tinted windows out front of his house, parked near a flagpole flying the red, white and blue. The car had a CA Exempt license plate, which meant it was a county car, and the odd thing is that it was midafternoon on a weekday. Shouldn't the supervisor have been at work?

Two Democratic senators, William Proxmire and Walter F. Mondale, found themselves late one night years ago on a flight home to the Midwest. Mondale, heading to Minnesota, bemoaned the Senate schedule that forced them to travel in the middle of the night. Proxmire, on his way to Wisconsin, saw it differently. With the near-midnight flight, he told Mondale, he could work well into the evening in the Senate "and be at a shopping center at 6 a.m."

Senior officials in Louisiana's emergency planning agency already were awaiting trial over allegations stemming from a federal investigation into waste, mismanagement and missing funds when Hurricane Katrina struck. And federal auditors are still trying to track as much as $60 million in unaccounted for funds that were funneled to the state from the Federal Emergency Management Agency dating back to 1998. In March, FEMA demanded that Louisiana repay $30.4 million to the federal government.

The City Council voted Tuesday to spend $240,000 to set up a waste and fraud unit in the city controller's office. Controller Laura Chick pushed for the special unit, saying her office did not have the staff or expertise to determine whether whistle-blower allegations were valid.

The Medicaid health insurance program for low-income and disabled people is overpaying for prescription drugs by hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars a year, according to three inspector general reports to be released today. Government pricing formulas intended to keep prescription costs in check have had the opposite effect, the reports found, resulting in payments that exceeded the market prices for thousands of prescriptions.

Economists and conservative politicians have long warned that government deficits, if left to accumulate year after year, would ultimately damage the nation's economy. The budget passed by the Senate on Thursday night seemed designed to put that theory to the test. The Senate's action emerged Friday as a budget-buster of multibillion-dollar proportions. Over the next five years, the budget approved by the Senate was estimated to result in deficits of $1.

Re "In Congress, Efforts to Structure Tight Budget Caught in Tug of War," March 16: Although they often campaign on the promise to improve the budget by cutting government waste, few in Washington seem willing to address the largest form of waste: recklessly irresponsible, usurious budgeting practices. Don't try to tell us we can pay our debt off faster by spending less money on it now. If any financial institution officials told us that, they'd be hauled off to keep convicted ex-WorldCom chief Bernard Ebbers company.

Regarding "A Valuable Drug Discovery at UC," Golden State, Feb. 17: Hey, Arnold, are you looking for government waste? Found some! Way to go, John A. Glaspy! As a California taxpayer, I would like to thank the UCLA cancer expert for his can-do attitude in finding ways to cut drug costs. This $800,000 savings at UCLA does not take into account the other University of California medical centers or even other potential savings in the UC system in general. It seems perfectly clear to me that if our governor is truly serious about discovering ways to reduce state expenditures by cutting waste, here it is. Gov. Schwarzenegger, the first thing that you can do is to eliminate the purchasing department at the UC offices.

The Pentagon may have wasted billions of dollars in Iraq because of a lack of planning and poor oversight, top congressional and Defense Department investigators said Tuesday. David M. Walker, head of the General Accounting Office, told a congressional panel that Defense Department planners had failed to adequately determine the needs of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and to effectively oversee the billions of dollars' worth of contracts issued.

As medical bills for the state prison system approach $1 billion a year, lawmakers Tuesday called into question the use of tax dollars for procedures such as a male inmate's breast reduction surgery and skin treatments at a Beverly Hills dermatologist. Paying millions to shuttle prisoners to hospitals hundreds of miles from where they are locked up also faced criticism.