Waste not, and save coveted arts funding

T ODAY

I’m going to show you one small instance of taxpayer money being wasted.

Multiply this by a thousand times at hundreds of agencies and you’ll understand why Washington’s finances are such a mess.

You’ve probably already heard that the Trump administration is planning massive spending cutbacks at most nondefense-related agencies. In fact,

Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is reported to have sent a letter recently to all federal agencies telling them to prepare for big cuts.

And you probably also know that there’s been enormous public uproar that some favorite government-subsidized organizations, especially in the field of health and the arts and humanities, are being unfunded. The Public Broadcast Service is tops among them.

This column is about “waste” and one agency’s unwillingness to address the issues — even when con- fronted by its own investigators.

Back in early December, the Inspector General’s (IG) office at the Commerce Department put out a memo with the innocuous title “Biweekly Reporting on Conference Spending by the Department of Commerce.”

Even if you could find this well-concealed memo, most of its contents are unintelligible. But the memo’s intent was clear. It explained a series of “new policies and practices for conference sponsorship, hosting and attendance to ensure that Federal funds are used appropriately on these activities.”

Fair enough. That’s a noble intention. In December, the IG knew President- elect Donald Trump was coming to town and that spending would be a big deal. So he tried to act.

The main problem addressed in the memo seems to be that when spending laws were changed a few years ago, the term “conference” was never clearly defined. Still, agencies are supposed to report any conferences that workers are attending that cost more than $20,000. Twenty freakin’ grand!

Think of how many pleasure trips lightly disguised as conferences a federal agency can sneak in for under $20,000. But it’s worse than that.

Government bureaucrats, being cunning individuals, learned how to get around that $20,000 rule.

Here are examples of what was going on.

The IG said that the US Patent and Trademark Office sent workers to a total of 36 conferences in 2015. Last year, that number sank to zero.

Did the USPTO suddenly stop sending workers to conferences in 2016? Well, not exactly. What the Patent Office did, according to the IG, was to stop calling conferences by their real name.

The USPTO was using an “overly broad” definition of what workers were attending, the IG said. How slick — and expensive.

The same thing appears to be happening at my least favorite government agency, the Census Bureau.

In 2015, Census sent workers to 14 conferences. In 2016, Census reported it sent employees to just three conferences.

Census explained that it didn’t get some conferences pre-approved, determining it wasn’t required for “meetings that were being held in regions throughout the year because they are considered Bureau employee training events.”

Sure! And Census wasn’t just trying to get around the $20,000 rule? Or skirt oversight by government pennypinchers?

As my regular readers already know, I’ve written a lot about Census and how it has a multibillion-dollar decennial census coming in the year 2020.

I’ve also written how government watchdogs don’t believe that the 2020 census will come in on budget — or, for that matter, that it will accurately reflect what is going on in the American population.

The Trump administration, if it is serious about reining in government spending, needs to go after waste like the one I just described. But it also needs to look at all money that goes out of organizations like Census, especially on contracts that are awarded without competitive bidding.

Find and eliminate even a little of this waste, and things like PBS will be easy affordable.

It isn’t often that I fail to take credit for something I got right.

But I just noticed that the Federal Reserve issued a new policy prohibiting Fed officials from talking with the public soon after I wrote a series of columns about New York Fed chief William Dudley playing fast and loose with the old rules.

I’m mentioning this because the head of the Richmond, Va., Fed got jettisoned from his job earlier this month for having an inappropriate phone conversation with a Wall Street analyst. In a column I wrote last week I complained that nobody cared when I caught Dudley having an “informal” dinner meeting in 2009 with a friend from Goldman Sachs during the socalled “blackout periods” before Fed policy meetings. Well, it turns out that the Fed apparently did care. And just months after my first column about Dudley’s transgressions (which I started writing about on Jan. 6, 2011), the Fed in Washington issued (on June 22, 2011) a new “FOMC Policy on External Communications of Committee Participants.” Part of that statement says that Fed Open Market Committee “participants will strive to ensure that their contacts with members of the public do not provide any profitmaking person or organization … They will consider this principle carefully and rigorously in scheduling meetings with anyone who might benefit financially from apparently exclusive contact with Fed officials …”