New Documents Reveal Lavish Spending At Government-Subsidized Travel-Promotion Agency

New Documents Reveal Lavish Spending At Government-Subsidized Travel-Promotion Agency – Daily Caller

Promoting travel to America can be expensive – especially if Uncle Sam is footing most of the bill.

Documents exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller show extensive waste and mismanagement at the public-private partnership Brand USA, a government-backed travel-promotion agency established in May 2011 under Travel Promotion Act of 2009 to encourage foreign travelers to visit the United States.

Some of the new organization’s recent expenses include $4,139 for 250 holiday cards, $3,592 for a holiday e-card and $2,449 for a ringtone version of the Rosanne Cash song “Land of Dreams,” which was created specifically for a sweeping Brand USA promotional campaign.

Also among the expenditures, according to the documents, are $2,700 for 26 sets of business cards and $50,252 for giveaway materials at the International Pow Wow trade show, which was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center earlier this year. The agency spent nearly $35,000 on Chinese-made water bottles for the event.

And Brand USA spent close to $1 million on its posh launch party in London last year, including $69,300 on freebies for attendees. Almost $50,000 went to neck wallets, and the organization dished out a grand total of $13,101 for umbrellas.

Brand USA has also paid out approximately $1 million in severance pay to eight terminated employees, the documents show.

In October, the Senate’s top Republican waste hawks released a report, titled “Initial Investigation of Brand USA and the Department of Commerce’s Oversight,” which detailed some of the agency’s lavish expenditures.

But Brand USA, which received $2 from the government for every $1 it received in cash and non-cash contributions throughout fiscal year 2012, seems to have lacked leadership, in addition to frugality.

A comprehensive audit of Brand USA, produced by KTS Business Consulting and exclusively obtained by TheDC, painted a particularly unflattering picture of the agency’s management.

“Although The Brand USA has a mission statement, not one staff member was able to recite it,” the audit reads. “Furthermore, a majority of the staff did not have any idea what the mission was… It became very clear that The Brand USA needs a strong vision. Staff’s responses were all varied, and it identified that there is not a consensus on the direction of the organization… Staff spends money without any checks and balances or funds tied to a budget.”

Anne Madison, a Brand USA spokeswoman, explained to TheDC that trade shows are an important part of promoting travel to the United States, and maintained that the agency’s expenses are reasonable.

“All expenditures for [the London] event went toward raising awareness of and inspiring travel to the United States, and are on par with any good marketing strategy to increase awareness, engagement and loyalty from those who significantly influence inbound travel to the USA,” Madison wrote in an email.

Madison insisted that 85 percent of the organization’s funding goes to marketing and programs to meet its international travel goals. And, citing internal Brand USA numbers, she claimed that “intent to visit” the U.S. has increased 12 percent in Canada, 14 percent in Japan and 14 percent in the United Kingdom since the agency’s launch.

Brand USA’s funding comes in part from a $14 fee levied on visitors to the U.S. from countries that do not require a visa for entry.

“The entire team at Brand USA is focused on and dedicated to pursuing and fulfilling [its] mandate,” she said. “In the process, we will be able to strengthen our economy and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs across a variety industries. Every 33 new international travelers that visit the United States creates one new job for America. That’s something we are proud to be a part of.”

But a former Brand USA employee, who requested anonymity, told TheDC the agency was not particularly concerned about keeping an eye on its expenditures.

“The government side of spending was just not at the fore – like [we were not thinking], ‘Oh my God, what would someone say if we had spent this much money on something?’ That was not the first question,” the ex-employee said, noting that the agency was initially focused mainly on getting off the ground, rather than saving money.

The former employee added that Brand USA’s spending slowed somewhat when the government began asking questions, but still remained excessive.

One Senate Republican staffer told TheDC that Brand USA’s expenditures are “very troubling,” adding that the agency “will likely be a continuing concern to members of the Republican Conference.”

“The only folks who are going to be able to put a stop to the wasteful spending at Brand USA is the leadership of the Department of Commerce,” the staffer said. “Unless someone over there is willing to grab Brand USA leadership by the lapels and tell them to knock it off or we’re not sending you any more checks, this type of stuff isn’t going to stop.”

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What Government Gets For $18.9B: Robo-Squirrels And Smokey The Bear Balloons

What Government Gets For $18.9B: Robo-Squirrels And Smokey The Bear Balloons – National Journal

Congress has taken a “let them eat caviar” attitude toward the American people, according to Sen. Tom Coburn.

As part of an annual “Wastebook” he released Monday, the Oklahoma Republican identified 100 government-backed projects, including a $300,000 effort to promote caviar consumption, that he says highlight the spend-happy nature of Congress at a time Americans are “struggling just to put the basics on the family dinner table.” Combined, the projects total $18.9 billion in what Coburn sees as excess spending.

“How many nutritious school lunches could have been served with the $1.8 million in financial assistance provided to cupcake specialty shops?,” Coburn asks in a letter at the start of the report.

The report derides initiatives from all branches of government, including some increased food stamp benefits for recipients that use medical marijuana, a NASA program designed to research proper food and drink for an unscheduled future mission to Mars and a $32,000 project to recreate a historic street out of Legos.

Coburn also calls out his colleagues for failing to address enough legislation, citing the statistic that they are on track to be the least productive legislature in history. The cost of their inactivity? $132 million, according to the report.

“Many high school student councils have been more deliberative than the U.S. Senate,” the report reads.

Not every line item in Coburn’s tally adds up. Many of the projects he ridicules list several-thousand-dollar price tags – with fine print below that explains the initiative was “part” of a certain government-funded grant costing that overall amount. In his tally of wasteful spending, Coburn also includes several loan guarantees for companies that have yet to fail. Though taxpayers would be on the hook if the company did go under, the government will be repaid the balance of the loan if the company succeeds.

Below, the Alley rounds up our 10 favorite examples from Coburn’s report:

$325,000 for an effort to build a lifelike Robo-Squirrel

$27 million for a project that included pottery classes for Moroccan artists translated by someone who was not fluent in English – and using materials that cannot be purchased in Morocco.

Almost $50,000 for Smokey the Bear hot-air balloon appearances.
$505,000 in block grants for a pet shampoo and toothpaste company.
$520,000 for an Ohio bridge that doesn’t connect to a road or trail.
$40,000 for a video game based on Thoreau’s writings at Walden Pond.
More than $540,000 for a dancing robot that DJs smartphones.
Nearly $68,000 for a “Students Against Trash” poster campaign.
$6.9 million for research into making rubber-free tires from natural materials.
$35,000 for a book vending machine.

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Record-Busting U.S. Spending On The United Nations

Record-Busting U.S. Spending On The United Nations – Pajamas Media

While President Obama exhorts American taxpayers to tighten their belts, and the U.S. flirts with default, the United Nations is setting new records for spending American money. The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has produced its latest report, required by Congress, on U.S. contributions to the UN. For the 2010 fiscal year, the U.S. bankrolled the UN to the tune of $7.69 billion. As the Heritage Foundation’s Brett Schaefer notes, that’s a “staggering 21 percent increase over FY2009.”

It’s also more than double the $3.539 which U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, in testimony this April to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, implied was the rough amount of U.S. annual spending on the UN.

The rise in U.S. contributions reflects soaring UN budgets over the past decade, to which the U.S. has been the biggest contributor. The exact percentage of UN activity funded by the U.S. varies, depending on which part of the UN we’re talking about. But browsing the OMB report can give you a pretty good idea of how big a hunk of the UN tab is bankrolled by American taxpayers. Scroll down in the report to page 2, where you can discover that the U.S. in fiscal 2010 bankrolled 27.3% of all UN peacekeeping, 22% of the regular budget, 33.6% of the World Food Program, and 26.5% of the budget of the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA).

What’s America getting for all this money? One seat, with one vote, in a 192-member General Assembly dominated by the largely anti-American preferences of the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the G-77 plus China. One permanent seat on the Security Council, alongside veto-wielding China (which contributes a mere 3.189% of the UN’s regular budget) and Russia (which contributes 1.6%). And such privileges as a chance to rub elbows with the likes of Iran and Cuba on the governing board of the UN’s flagship agency, the UN Development Program (UNDP). Plus the endless circus act in which the UN promises transparency, better oversight and more efficient management – and delivers soaring budgets, opaque finances and bubbling scandals. All those American billions now pouring into the UN had their origins in work done by Americans, who earned that money, and then had it taxed away by government – and turned over to the UN. Given a choice, could those taxpayers perhaps find better uses for their dollars?

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Federal Government Doles Out $125 Billion In “Improper Payments”

Federal Government Doles Out $125 Billion In “Improper Payments” – Judicial Watch

With the national debt and federal spending at an all-time high several U.S. government agencies joined forces to make an outlandish $125 billion in “improper payments” last year, an increase of more than $16 billion from the previous year.

This sort of government waste and corruption is hardly an earth-shattering development. Congressional investigators have for years documented the growing crisis of federal agencies making fraudulent payments to those who don’t qualify yet little has been done to correct the situation. In fact, this month’s audit containing the latest figures stresses that previous investigations have “highlighted long-standing, widespread and significant problems with improper payments in the federal government.”

The impropriety is so pervasive that President Obama issued a much-ballyhooed order last summer commanding federal agencies to create a “Do Not Pay List” to protect taxpayer resources and stem abuse. It has done nothing to protect increasingly scarce taxpayer dollars, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress.

In its latest report the GAO reveals that federal agencies made $125.4 billion in improper payments in fiscal 2010, marking a substantial increase from the $109.2 billion it dished out in fiscal 2009. The biggest chunk of the fraudulent payments—more than 90%—was made by social spending programs, mainly Medicare (health coverage for the elderly), Medicaid (health coverage for the poor) and the Labor Department’s unemployment insurance.

Improper income tax credits, Social Security and disability payments, free school lunches and food stamps round off the top 10. Incredibly, just a few weeks ago the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched a $5 million campaign to recruit more food-stamp recipients, even though the GAO reveals that the agency doled out nearly $4.8 billion in improper benefits last year due to “incorrect computations, misapplication of an income or resource exclusion and inadequate verification of accounts and wages.”

There seems to be no end in site to the waste, according to GAO investigators, who diplomatically state that “challenges” remain in “determining the full extent of improper payments across the federal government and in reasonably assuring that effective actions are taken to reduce improper payments.” Some agencies don’t even bother reporting improper payments, the GAO says, so the full extent of the problem will never really be known.

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