I have a crazy idea: let’s save millions of dollars by not spending money to build broadband networks where they already exist. The insanity of so-called “broadband stimulus” projects has been covered quite nicely here at BigGovernment by Seton Motley, but my good friend Dave Williams of the newly-formed Taxpayers’ Protection Alliance wrote about a part of this debate that hasn’t been covered enough: loan guarantees given out by the Rural Utilities Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

With a budget deficit that is as large on its own as the entire federal budget of 1998, the folks in Congress who’d like to avoid a crippling debt crisis (those crazy kids!) are looking for ways to trim the fat. Luckily for legislators there is an area of “USDA prime” waste they can carve out: the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s desperate dash for taxpayer cash in the form of superfluous subsidies for rural broadband efforts.

USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) is an outdated agency whose roots go all the way back to FDR’s New Deal-era Rural Electrification Administration. Originally meant to help bring electricity to farmers in remote areas, its mission was expanded in 1949 to include telephone service and, half a century later, Internet service. Ostensibly, its goal is to subsidize the construction of broadband networks in sparsely-populated areas that do not have them.

But in its ham-fisted attempt to bring high-speed Internet service to areas where there is none, RUS has consistently given money to organizations which build over existing private broadband networks. A 2005 report from the USDA Inspector General found that “RUS has not maintained its focus on rural communities without preexisting service.” The same report determined that “in one of the more highly publicized cases, RUS issued loans to a company providing broadband access to affluent suburban communities a few miles outside of Houston, Texas.”

(more…)

Alaska’s $680 million bridge to nowhere still a state priority

17,000 Medicaid patients put on waiting lists for medical services in Maryland as the state misspends $98 million including paying for services for dead people

Medicare loses $60 billion to fraud every year

Democrat political consultants receive millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds; Millions more spent to heat a near-empty shopping mall, to search for fossils in Argentina, for socially conscious puppet shows, and to study the genetic makeup of ants

(more…)

From todays The Hill:

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008.

Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.

Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was issued to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, according to federal records.Federal records also show that a former adviser to President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign received nearly $70,000 from that contract to help alert viewers in difficult-to-reach communities that their televisions would soon no longer receive broadcast signals.

(more…)