From The Hartford Courant, 7/20/06:
http://www.courant.com/news/nationworld/hc-katrina0720.artjul20,0,4713148.story?coll=hc-headlines-nationworld
Agency's Disarray On Display
Report Prompts Sharp Questions On Homeland Security Spending,
Management
By DAVID LIGHTMAN, Washington Bureau Chief WASHINGTON --
At 7:52 a.m. Wednesday, about two hours before Department of Homeland
Security officials were due to be grilled about why employees bought
beer-brewing kits, plasma TVs, and other questionable items, the
Senate committee chairman's office got an e-mail.
The 12 missing flat-bottom boats the department and congressional
investigators could not find had suddenly turned up, it said.
So had 74 of the 107 laptop computers logged as missing.
All in all, said the half-page message from DHS official James Norton,
$217,000 of $280,000 in long-missing Federal Emergency Management
Administration purchases have now been located.
To Sen. Susan M. Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate homeland
security committee, and other lawmakers, this last-minute revelation
offered more evidence that the department is too often mired in chaos
and mismanagement.
"People in this country are repeatedly losing confidence in the
ability of the department to carry out its mission," she said.
"They're willing to pay tax dollars for security, but they're not
willing to have their money frittered away."
She and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., the committee's top
Democrat, were instrumental in creating the agency three years ago.
They saw DHS as a way to bring together a number of disparate agencies
scattered throughout the government but all with an identical mission:
homeland security.
But it's been hard to merge the bureaucratic cultures of the Coast
Guard, immigration, border patrol, customs and others, and the
committee has wound up conducting what seems like a steady stream of
hearings and investigations aimed at finding out what went wrong.
This year alone, it has probed the inept response to Hurricane
Katrina, voiced concerns about transit and port security and tackled
the controversy about distribution of funds to local governments.
One of the bigger problems has been developing uniform guidelines for
spending money.
The GAO report presented Wednesday laid out a series of abuses and
potential fraud involving purchase cards given to nearly 10,000 DHS
employees.
The cards are meant to expedite purchases of items needed in emergency
situations, but GAO found a number of transactions it labeled as
abusive and possibly fraudulent.
Among them:
a $227 beer-brewing kit so the Coast Guard could make its own beer for
parties;
about $68,000 worth of dog booties that have sat unused;
nearly $7,000 for 54 iPods for the U.S. Secret Service
and about $5,000 for training at plush Southern resorts.
The GAO came up with another tale that bothered committee members when
it detailed the saga of $465,000 worth of meals ready to eat, or MREs.
Border patrol officials bought the food and sent it to the Gulf region
for its employees who were helping with hurricane relief.
But those employees left sooner than expected, so the meals were sent
to a training facility in El Paso, Texas.
Officials there did not want the food, saying it did not have enough
calories for the border patrol employees.
So most of the meals sit in a warehouse - but others are being given
to illegal immigrants seized by the agency.
"Egregious and wasteful," lamented Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn.
David L. Nordquist, DHS chief financial officer, Wednesday defended
the purchase card system, saying disciplinary action has been taken in
70 instances this year.
He said the agency also is working on a policy manual for all
cardholders, to replace a patchwork of existing rules.
"This manual will address the problems identified in the review,"
Nordquist said.
But Collins was not pleased that Nordquist could not tell her when the
manual would be ready.
He said the agency saw the GAO report only late last week, and had not
had enough time to respond.
She was also skeptical about the sudden re-emergence of the boats and
computers on the eve of the hearing, months after department officials
told investigators they could not account for them.
The computers were found in Louisiana.
Nordquist could not say where the boats were located.
He said they turned up because the agency began pushing hard for
answers to the GAO's concerns late last week.
GAO briefed DHS officials Friday.
"I had not known what they were looking at," he said in an interview.
"When I heard about this, I said, `OK, guys, let's look into this.'"
The senators, veterans of hearings dealing with DHS troubles, were
unsurprised.
"It appears as though this agency has had an eleventh-hour epiphany,"
Coleman said.
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Heckuva job, Chertoff.
Harry
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