Bureaucrats, Start Your Spendings ...

Holy crap. Catching up on some old news, I just read this article. What the hell is going on up there in Washington, D.C.?

This is Exhibit "[large number]" that the bureaucrats and politicians have become thoroughly disconnected from reality.

The key sentence in the article (to me) is:

• At the request of the Bush administration, Congress increased the credit line [for credit cards carried by federal employees] to $250,000 as part of a massive Katrina recovery bill approved last week.

How many federal employees does this affect? Ah, I love symmetry.

It affects approximately 250,000 employees.

The article goes on to note that in response to criticism of the increased limit, the Bush administration implemented the following policy:

• Purchases of more than $50,000 must be preapproved by a senior manager.

What are any of these employees going to buy that costs more than $50,000 for a single purchase? With a credit card? I hope the answer to that question is "nothing." Fifty thousand dollars is a HUGE sum of taxpayer dollars to be able to charge.

Executive director of the "watchdog group" Project on Government Oversight summarizes the problem thusly:

• "[W]e have far too many people with far too much access to money without any organization or effective oversight," she said.

No kidding!