$16 muffins, $8 coffee served in Justice audit

[defendandprotect]

$16 muffins, $8 coffee served in Justice audit

The DOJ spent $121 million on conferences in fiscal 2008 and 2009, which exceeded its own spending limits and appeared to be extravagant and wasteful, according to the report that examined 10 conferences held during that period.

The review turned up the expensive muffins, which came from the Capital Hilton Hotel just blocks from the White House, as well as cookies and brownies that cost almost $10 each.

The department spent $32 per person on snacks of Cracker Jack, popcorn, and candy bars and coffee that cost $8.24 per cup at another conference, the report said.

The DOJ also spent nearly $600,000 for event planning services for five conferences, the document said.

http://news.yahoo.com/16-muffins-8-coffee-served-justice-audit-023623142.html

[Zax2me]

1. Sounds a lot like the stimulus spending.

Too much for too little in return.

[FarCenter]

2. Note that it covers 2008, the last Bush year

[Skidmore]

3. I planned some working lunches for committees in which

brown bag lunches were $5.50 and a whole dozen cookies were less than $10 at the local supermarket bakery. I made the coffee from the office supply. Anything above per diems should be paid for by the participants if standard fare isn't good enough for them.

[midnight]

4. DOJ should of used that money for the paychecks of public defenders for the poor.... In Waukesha Wi

The court house that Kathy Nicolas gets to cause all kinds of human error, the nice sheriff's dept., has given a chunk of funding to the prosecutors office to expand prosecution. Oddly this comes at a time when the funding for public defenders has been slashed...

[ChairmanAgnostic]

5. My sweets organizes trade show stuff for a foreign

company.

In Chicago, those type of "convention" costs are normal. Offensive? you bet, but normal.

She tried to have 500 pieces of sushi from a high end restaurant brought in. (tis a japanese company) They charged a surcharge for each piece, something like $1-2.

Bottled water? $5 each
Coffee urns? even though these were big urns, the caffeinated and decaf ran $300 each, which was about $8 per cup. She got a break on the hot water. That was only $200. (japanese conventioneers drink tea)
Beer was either $8 or $16. $8 got you bud and coors. $16 got you sapporo.

When I looked over the final tab, I was in shock. Unbelievable. They even charge to have an electrician plug in an electric plug into the wall socket.

[grahampuba]

6. when haliburton is your caterer..

you get the special DOD rate, cases of cola for $45. Paperclips for $10/ea!

[yellerpup]

7. Hotel food is ridiculously marked up.

In Boston last spring our room service menu listed blueberry pancakes for $27 and if you wanted bacon to go with it, add on another $18. If they meet in a nice hotel on the East coast $32 a head for snacks sounds like it's probably the cheapest option.

Edited: "back" to "bacon"

[Angry Dragon]

8. Here is the pdf of the report

http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/plus/a1143.pdf

[MADem]

9. You can buy a birthday cake for less than one of those muffins! nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. LARGER picture

chump change.

Grassley got what he wanted though...

[Johonny]

12. Yup

Ask for 1.5 trillion in tax increases, GOP get out the 16 $ muffin story to get the middle class and the poor fighting against the government workers again.

[jmowreader]

11. I think we all know exactly how this happened

Thanks to our government's wonderful fiscal policies, you have to spend every nickel of your budget allocation before the end of the year or two things happen: they take back what you didn't spend, and they cut next year's budget by that amount.

This leads to an environment where throwing away money is almost encouraged. Let's make a simple example: The budget for your agency, which has 2500 offices nationwide, includes $5 million to buy printer paper at $40 per case. (That's two reams a day for each office. If you do a lot of printing, you'll use that.) In this day and age, they don't do centralized purchasing for shit like printer paper; they give each office $2000 and tell them to buy fifty boxes of paper. That's all well and good, but if Office Depot decides to put paper on sale for $30 per case, your agency suddenly has to figure out a way to get rid of $1.25 million before the end of the year. You can't use it to buy new computers or something else you need because those are capital purchases and have to be approved. They can't buy more paper because (1) they have nowhere to put it and (2) they'd get investigated for doing that. It's simply easier to buy weasel shit coffee for the annual conference, or something.

Far better is the way the National Reconnaissance Office got its $224 million headquarters. NRO deals in satellite intelligence, and that's expensive. They have a secret budget. They also had a fantastic negotiator in charge of buying equipment. He did so well he saved the government $250 million over ten years. You can't give money back, so they buried it in the back yard until they had enough for a new building, which no one knew about until some high-level bureaucrat was driving down the road, saw the new place being built and wondered what it was. The shit hit the fan but I thought it was great that they were such good stewards of the public purse.

[bengalherder]

13. That is outrageous!

I've worked in fine catering. $32 will get you a decent plate of food assembled by master cooks.

Buying crispy creme and cracker jacks with that money is just fucking lame.

Trim this fat instead of gutting our safety net for the poor. They should start considering the brown bag to be a necessity since it is one of those sacrifices they wish to impose on us.