Three years into Barack Obama’s historic presidency and a few months after the suppository called Obamacare took up residence in the nation’s orifice, we come to find out that over the better part of the last five years, half a billion dollars have been doled out to dead people.

Seems that dead people in the US are “in a better place” to receive a hefty check from the US Treasury. That’s right, if you’re short on cash, the easiest way to earn a few bucks is to die.

Apparently, $600 million in benefit payments meant for retired or disabled federal workers have been “doled out” to room temperature individuals who won’t be stimulating the economy with federally-endowed monies anytime soon.

It’s hard to believe, but “In one case, the son of a beneficiary continued receiving payments for 37 years after his father’s death in 1971. The payments — totaling more than $515,000 — were only discovered when the son died in 2008.”

Shouldn’t a prerequisite to reassuring Americans that the government is more than capable of overseeing national health care be to establish a system that accurately differentiates between the living and the dead?

It is important to mention that the decades-long cash-to-cadavers problem cannot be laid solely on the headstone of the Obama administration. However, George W. Bush did not want to play doctor with the American health care system, so it stands to reason that Barack Obama MD should be held to a higher standard of accuracy when it comes to Americans who are flat-lining versus those whose oxygen level consistently hovers around 99.

The scary part of the whole scenario is that “the government has been aware of the problem since 2005,” when the “inspector general’s report revealed defects in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund.” In fact, 2.5 million federal workers receive more than $60 billion in benefit payments annually from the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund.

The same federal government touting the benefits of electronic health records for all Americans claims to have “tried matching the fund’s computer records with the Social Security Administration’s death records, checking tax records and improving the timeliness of death reporting.” Yet the improper payments have continued, despite more than a half dozen attempts to develop a system “to determine which beneficiaries are still alive and which are dead.”

With that kind of track record, for lack of a more efficient system Obamacare could spend six years administering barium enemas in a morgue, or end up giving melanoma patients Robitussin in place of Roferon-A ®.

Always on the cutting edge of technology, in 2009 President Obama announced a medical health record system for veterans, wherein “an electronic record would follow a service member in the military and then later in the Veterans Affairs Department’s medical system.” Obama claimed that “the electronic record keeping system will handle military service members’ administrative and medical records from the day they enter service and insure that those files are transferred automatically to the Department of Veterans Affairs when they leave active duty.”

Sounds wonderful, but out of curiosity it would be interesting to find out how many of the dead people who received part of the $600 million between 2009 and 2011 were federal workers who served in the armed forces.

Supposedly, to address the problem, the United States Office of Personnel Management “sampled its records of all recipients over 90 years old to confirm whether they are still alive. In 2009, there were more than 125,000 recipients identified as over 90 and about 3,400 over 100 years old” – individuals who, despite not having the assistance of Obamacare, managed to attain the title nonagenarian and centenarian.

Even still, in the midst of reassuring America that the government is presently well equipped to monitor life-and-death health care decisions, “both the Obama administration and Congress” are also in the process of making it a “higher priority [than it was] to crack down on improper government payments.”

Which begs the question:  If the government doesn’t yet have a system to address the problem of giving money to corpses, how is their system prepared to supervise national healthcare for 300 million living, breathing organisms? If dead people are still getting government money, it stands to reason that in the future, a few live people could wake up while being embalmed.

Shouldn’t those who feel qualified to monitor the cardiac health of America at least know how to use a stethoscope and take a pulse before manning the ambulance?

In addition to the $600 million, in the midst of establishing a nationalized healthcare system and reinforcing a failing economy, “Last year, government investigators [also] found that more than 89,000 stimulus payments of $250 each from the massive economic recovery package went to people who were either dead or in prison.”

Not to worry though, because bureaucrats believe it’s “time to stop, once and for all, this waste of taxpayer money,” which is why it is entirely possible that the $22 million misappropriation of stimulus funds could have been another well thought-out diagnostic pilot program.

In the run-up to healthcare reform, what better way to iron out some of the cash-to-cadaver kinks than for the President of the United States to purposely employ the dearly departed to help address the problem of the federal government sending $600 million to correctional centers and cemeteries?

I was on the road recently, driving from my home in southeast Louisiana through a long stretch of Mississippi to Tuscaloosa, Ala., then to the outskirts of Birmingham and on to Auburn, Ala., and finally back to my home by way of Montgomery and Mobile. Along the way I was slowed from time to time as I passed by road and bridge repair projects marked with prominent signs indicating they were funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama’s so-called stimulus bill.

Naturally I was thrilled to see my tax dollars at work, although honesty compels me to report that not much actual work seemed to be going on at any of the sites. Most of the visible workers were just standing around. Of course, such standing around is typical of public construction projects, so I don’t suppose that what I saw was in any way owing to the stimulus funding in particular.

This huge legislative enactment provides for a great variety of increased spending and some reduction in taxes over a period of 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office computed that the net amount of money to be injected into, or not removed from, the economy as a result of the stimulus bill totals about $787 billion.

At the time the bill was being debated and discussed, a common plea in its defense had to do with funding so-called shovel-ready projects to repair or replace public roads, bridges and other structures widely taken to be in a state of decay or disrepair. This plea made an appealing talking point, since most Americans place at least some value on such infrastructure.

Alas, only a tiny proportion of the funds expended so far has been directed to this well-advertised objective.

According to the government’s website for tracking stimulus expenditures (Recovery.gov), as of October 27, 2010, $464.2 billion had been made available to a long list of government agencies and $317.8 billion had been spent.

Of the total amount disbursed, 70 percent had been spent by three departments: $91.9 billion by the Department of Health and Human Services, $65.0 billion by the Department of Education, and $62.6 billion by the Department of Labor. The Department of Transportation’s outlays came to just $21.6 billion, or 6.8 percent of the total.

Shovel-ready infrastructure projects have evidently proved difficult to find. Small wonder, then, that President Obama confessed just prior to the election to having “realized too late that ‘there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.’” Despite this realization, the president did not propose freezing such spending. Perhaps he had other objectives in mind from the start.

Other leading spenders of “stimulus” money have included the Department of Agriculture ($18.5 billion), the Social Security Administration ($13.7 billion), the Department of the Treasury ($7.9 billion), and the Environmental Protection Agency ($4.3 billion).

A common element of these government departments and agencies is their shortage of shovels, not to mention shovel-ready projects. They also excel at dishing out subsidies to undeserving but politically potent special interests and paying handsome salaries and benefits to bureaucratic drones and wreckers on the government payroll.

So far, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent $733 million of the more than $1 billion allocated to it. Is it possible to shovel outer space?

No doubt the General Services Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Science Foundation, the Railroad Retirement Board, and the National Endowment for the Arts are shoveling something. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to ascertain exactly what.

Yet, as I saw with my own eyes, some work evidently is going on in Mississippi and Alabama to fix roads and bridges. That’s something, but it’s hardly going to have a noticeable effect on recovery from the recession.

Millions of the federal dollars misspent on cars, boats and travel by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Social Security Administration overpaid millions of dollars in Supplemental Security Income payments; Thirty percent of agency’s payments miscalculated

DOJ crime prevention programs uses poetry and rap to fight crimes involving guns and gangs

Investigation into whether the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration made good use of $900 million stopped because the agency’s records are “incomplete”

Texas residents unhappy with unnecessary FEMA plan to post 400 signs showing how high the storm surge would be in a major hurricane

National Science Foundation studies words people use to describe videos, photographs and webpages on the internet

Sadly, this is not made up, and paying for it does not create a “festive atmosphere” for taxpayers.

From a report issued by the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration:

The 2006 Diversity Conference was held in Atlanta, Georgia, and sponsored by the Social Security Administration (SSA) Headquarters and the Atlanta Region.  Attendees, including employees, were required to pay their own travel and lodging expenses if they wished to attend.  Attendees also paid a conference activity fee of $105 covering the reception on the first day and dinner the next evening.  SSA paid travel expenses for a certain number of employees who were involved in the planning and execution of the conference, held one of several executive level positions, and/or held a position on one of six Advisory Councils.  The budget for the conference was approximately $700,000.

The investigation found issues with the procurement of speakers and trainers, entertainment, and giveaways.  For example, some items were purchased using the micro-purchase process rather than submitting a requisition to the Agency’s Office of Acquisition and Grants.  In other cases, employees used split purchasing to circumvent the $2,500 micro-purchase threshold to acquire these items.  In addition, questionable practices were used to pay transportation costs for the speakers hired to give presentations during the conference.  The investigation also found SSA paid for other types of entertainment, including massage therapists, a juggling stilt walker, a strolling magician, a caricature artist, and a clown.  This entertainment was justified by the conference planners as being necessary to help create a festive atmosphere at the conference.

As they say, the nation is in the very best of hands!

As Director of OMB, Peter Orszag is the arbiter of all financial information shared with Congress.  A series of little-known, OMB “circulars”, such as A-11, have established the rules, and repercussions if violated, by which Executive branch agencies communicate with Congress, especially regarding budgets, funding and agency priorities.

OMB, the President’s gatekeeper for budget matters, executes a complicated juggling act, balancing Obama Administration priorities and budgetary spin, against agency needs.   Frequently, to secure a critical vote, an elected member may be rewarded with a pork project for the folks back home, and, often, it’s the OMB director that has to figure out how to avoid the appearance of a bald-faced bribe, while manipulating CBO scoring on infrastructure projects.  Orszag, as the former head of CBO, understands exactly how this game is played.  Thus, most of the project and budget information that Congress reviews have been shaped by OMB’s preferences.

Peter Orszag controls much of the content and quantity of the data flow to Congress, to the President and to American citizens.  Orszag has oversight over most of the federal government’s critical data reporting structures.  Apart from the ineffective and error-prone Stimulus reporting sites (data.gov, recovery.gov),, OMB oversees federal contract opportunities and federal grants.

Perhaps even less well known, OMB reviews and edits most of the testimony submitted to Congress, and edits most of the responses that Cabinet members and federal agencies submit in response to Congressional queries.   Hence, Mr. Orszag is able to not only manipulate the numbers, but is simultaneously able to insure that there is discipline throughout the Administration regarding talking points.

The great concern is that Mr. Orszag, by all accounts a bright fellow, seems to demonstrate an ability to misrepresent facts and figures to further the confusion.  Put bluntly, Mr. Orszag does not seem to be a truthful man.  Moreover, he seems unusually good at deception.   From the deceptions and messiness of his personal life, where salacious stories, recently publicized about his personal life, of two girlfriends and an illegitimate child, generated a media frenzy, we learn that Peter Orszag  seems especially adept at  deceiving those closest to him, people that know him best.   In his official capacity, Mr. Orszag seems to have been especially deceptive, able and willing to misrepresent facts.

This past year, to advance the myth of “jobs created/jobs saved”, Orszag seems to have used his power to fudge the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment numbers (dropping millions of unemployed Americans off the reports, thereby enhancing the monthly unemployment statistics) and he has enhanced the “jobs created” numbers, by issuing a memo, directing Agency heads to claim that all existing federal government jobs, where work is performed administering Stimulus funds, should count as “jobs saved”.

Nowhere will this willingness to deceive be more keenly felt than in the follow-up to the recent Healthcare Reform legislation signed into law by President Obama.  Congress has trusted a CBO scoring that requires over $500Billion in cuts to various government programs and entitlements.  OMB is the office that will ultimately have the responsibility for identifying, tracking and reporting on these cuts, since expenditures for Health and Human Services (HHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) report to OMB.  What OMB decides to show Congress is what Congress is going to see.

The Administration will, understandably, be eager to claim that cuts were made, but if the past year’s accounting by OMB is any indication, the cuts are unlikely to occur, though the data may be manipulated to imply that the cuts occurred.  This kind of obfuscation is bad for Congress, which will be trying to measure whether the Healthcare Reform program is working as advertised, and bad for American taxpayers, who are getting stuck with the bill.

Americans might expect that others , wise to these sorts of shenanigans, might blow the whistle, but that’s not likely to happen since for the OMB Deputy Director chairs the (President’s) Committee for Integrity  and Efficiency (PCIE) which oversees  the federal government’s Inspectors General.  Indeed, when one IG at OPM recently tried to go around OMB, an OMB staffer bluntly asserted that “we will make your life miserable”.

Peter Orszag is responsible for implementing   President Obama’s  campaign promise of a line-by-line review of the federal budget to eliminate any non-performing federal programs , exposing federal programs that are non-performing and wasting taxpayer money.

Mr. Orszag’s most publicized, cost-cutting effort was the SAVE competition, designed to encourage federal employees to identify waste and propose solutions to trim the ever-growing $1,300,000,000,000 deficit.  The winning idea recommended that patients at Veteran Hospitals take home unused eye drops and other over-the-counter medication when discharged.   Not a bad idea, but it is becoming clear that the SAVE program, like so many of Mr. Orszag’s other efforts, was primarily a PR gimmick that helped deflect criticism about the Administration’s out-of-control spending.

When all the man hours, and effort, that was poured into implementing the SAVE program at OMB are considered, Americans will likely find that the costs of running the SAVE program far exceeds any gains or savings that the program may achieve.

Mr. Orszag has been especially active in government contracting, (the head of federal procurement – the Office of Federal Procurement Policy [OFPP] is part of OMB) and Orszag has boasted of improvements.  But, the results flowing from his decisions are making existing procurement problems worse, crushing small business opportunities and exacerbating the very problem he hopes to solve.   Indeed, the health of the once-vibrant, small business, government contracting community has  probably never been so dire, and is likely to get much worse as a result of Mr. Orszag’s ham-handed efforts to improve the federal acquisition system.

What makes Peter Orszag so dangerous is his access to more information, at a granular level, than any federal employee.  Information is power, and the ability to sculpt information with impunity makes Orszag dangerous.  Information withheld can cause as many problems as information that has been doctored, and whether intentional, or not, inaccurate information, disseminated by OMB, presented as fact to Congress and the American people, is what has often occurred.

So, at a time when our nation needs to confront our budgetary problems with honesty and determination, Americans should be asking themselves: are Orszag’s skills at deception what we really want to see in our OMB director?

Nor were these fans disappointed, for, despite running $1.2 trillion in annual deficits, President Obama has once again promised to borrow from the future to fund yet another round of pork and dodgy projects disguised as infrastructure and green investments.

At the same time the President was busy adding more spending programs to our bloated budget, he insisted, once again, that he was committed to fiscal discipline.  Obama said “We’ve combed the budget, cutting waste and excess wherever we could.”  Really?

What programs have been cut and what sorts of excess were eliminated?  For the curious….here goes.  After several months, Obama’s OMB has released a list of the top four programs that have been identified after an exhaustive search and combing of the federal budget.

The Administration reviewed over 38,000 different ideas, to aggressively root out wasteful practices, many of them submitted by government employees.   After much work, synthesis,and review, OMB announced the four cost-cutting idea finalists:

• Let veterans take home unused medications that would otherwise be thrown away upon discharge from Veterans Affairs Department hospitals.
• Allow Forest Service personnel to deposit revenue from park fees or campground passes locally rather than sending it through a unit collections officer.
• Schedule Social Security appointments online.
• Have a single inspection for subsidized housing units, even those with multiple funders.

Wow! These are Obama’s four big ideas that he cites as an example of “combing the government, cutting waste and excess wherever we could”.  This is it.  This is the best the Obama Administration could do.

Of course, these ideas won’t save much. At best, these projects will make a small dent in spending.   At worst, these are four ideas derived from a much-ballyhooed Presidential Initiative that never intended to confront the problem of wasteful spending throughout the government, but was simply a political stunt to divert attention from bloated spending and ballooning deficits, now running in excess of $1,200,000,000,000 per year.

The career government employees who recommended these cost savings idea should not be ridiculed nor should the ideas be rejected (with a $1.2T deficit– we need to encourage innovation and cost-cutting).

But, if this list is the best we can do, the country is in real trouble.

Team Obama seems to have no ability and no desire to make a serious effort to rein in out of control government spending.  Yet, on the spending side, Team Obama can conjure up new, multi-billion dollar government programs with ease. President Obama is accelerating our fiscal and budgetary collapse.   If Americans were not afraid before, they should be.

Medicare paid up to $92 million for medical services ordered by dead doctors, some of whom had been dead for more than 10 years

Social Security Administration sent out $250 stimulus checks to 10,000 people who are deceased, some of which have been dead for several decades

U.S. Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion in federal farm aid to the estates or companies of deceased farmers

San Francisco receives federal funding for AIDS patients who died decades ago

Dallas Housing Authority spent federal funds to subsidize housing for 45 deceased clients