Category Archives: Waste

Obama Presidential Center Debacle Could Hammer Taxpayers

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The Obama Presidential Center may be an eyesore, but it is a fitting tribute to the Obama presidency. Consider this story from Fox News:

Concern is mounting that taxpayers could be left holding the bag if the Obama Presidential Center runs into financial trouble, as the foundation behind it has yet to establish a promised $470 million safety net to guard against a public bailout.

The scrutiny comes as a Fox News Digital investigation found multiple contractors and subcontractors claiming losses ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions on the project, with some alleging they remain locked in payment disputes and face financial ruin just days before the center’s grand opening.

There was supposed to be a safety net so that Obama would not resume his old habit of bleeding taxpayers…

Under its agreement with the city, the Obama Foundation pledged to create the fund, known as an endowment, as part of its 99-year deal to take control of the publicly owned 19.3-acre section of Jackson Park for a one-time payment of just $10.

…but leftists are never done bleeding taxpayers. According to the most recent findings, only $1 million is in the fund. In the context of Democrats throwing money down ratholes, that is a rounding error.

Concerns about the center’s financial state have raged for years, especially since construction delays and costs have ballooned from an original estimate of roughly $330 million to at least $850 million based on 2021 figures. An updated final projected cost has not been made public.

There is a simple solution. Put Democrats back in the White House, federalize the project, and then print whatever amount of money will finance this hideous monument to a pernicious moonbat’s ego.

As fitting as the bloated cost, incompetent management, and likelihood of shafting taxpayers is the scheduled day the Obama Center will open to the public. Juneteenth was established as a federal holiday to reward race riots for which Obama sowed the seeds with his racially divisive community activist tactics.

On tips from abcanc and Straight Shootr.

Mamdani Throws Money at Propaganda Bureau and Chocolate Condoms

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No wonder Zohran Mamdani demands the state raise taxes even higher to help him pay the bills in New York City. He has major expenses to contend with. These include a new propaganda bureau and chocolate flavored condoms.

The New York Post reports:

Taxpayers are on the hook for $5.2 million to pay the swollen salaries of the information ministers in socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new City Hall propaganda bureau – a staggering 175% more than first thought, The Post can reveal.

It’s barely been open for business for a month, but the Office of Mass Engagement has already seen its headcount balloon 186% from 14 to 40, with $5,123,756 earmarked for salaries, according to the city’s recently released 2027 executive budget.

Nothing grows as relentlessly as a government program.

Mamdani is planning to hire an additional 26 comrades by next year, at an average salary of $125,000, based on details in the budget. …

Workers in the Office of Mass Engagement come on top of the mayor’s own communications team, which is expected to be larger than that of any other mayor in Big Apple history, sources said.

At least chocolate condoms don’t cost as much as moonbat propagandists. Via Frontpage Magazine:

Gonorrhea rates in New York City have more than doubled in a decade and syphilis is ‘surging’ statewide. Mamdani’s Department of Health has responded to this crisis by rushing a free supply of lubricant and chocolate flavored condoms.

As with all things Democrat, Cultural Marxism comes into play:

Councilwoman Pierina Sanchez, a Mamdani ally, explained that the free chocolate flavored condoms were necessary because “inequities persist among women, low-income households, and Black and Latino New Yorkers.”

Sorry white male New Yorkers who work instead of vote for a living. No chocolate condoms for you.

Gonorrhea and syphilis are not the only diseases that unsurprisingly are on the rise in a city run by moonbats:

After a Legionnaire’s disease outbreak in city buildings in Harlem killed 5 people last year, several residents in Manhattan public housing came down with the disease this year. Residents in public housing were told to stop taking showers and fill up bathtubs very slowly as they try to figure out what’s causing it.

Health officials hadn’t gotten around to issuing this warning until the second person came down with the disease, but that’s a step up from last year when the source of the outbreak turned out to be the site of the New York City Public Health Laboratory: a ‘state of the art’ $454 million glass and steel tower whose bureaucrats would be “tasked with protecting and promoting the health of all New Yorkers and keeping the city at the forefront of disease response and investigation” which instead infected around 100 people with a disease.

Half a $billion for yet another building full of largely useless overpaid bureaucrats. Good thing money is free when it belongs to someone else.

On tips from Wiggins and Franco.

Welfare State Wastes Hundreds of $Billions on Overpayments

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You wouldn’t put a Black Lives Matter mob in charge of a shopping mall. Why would you put liberal bureaucrats in charge of other people’s money? The inevitable result is the same: an orgiastic looting spree.

The New York Post reports:

The federal government overpaid welfare and social services recipients by a stunning $186 billion in fiscal year 2025, a startling surge of $24 billion from the previous year’s total.

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), 15 federal agencies made up the massive improper payments overage spanning 64 programs, with approximately 82% of the overages the result of overpayments.

This does not count the hundreds of $billions lost to straightforward fraud of the type Somali colonists multiculturally enrich us with.

JD Vance is heading a task force intended to address the fraud. These efforts will be abandoned the day Democrats retake the White House.

Overpayments included $57 billion from Medicare, $37 billion from Medicaid, $21 billion for unearned Earned Income Tax Credit, and $10 billion for food stamps. Some highly suspect programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families were not counted.

These numbers are dwarfed by the actual scale of the problem. It could be argued that every penny doled out by the welfare state is an overpayment. It is not the proper role of government to confiscate money from those it belongs to so as to hand it out to those it does not.

As the welfare state continues to feed on itself, the waste will become ever more extravagant until it collapses the entire economy, as per the Cloward-Piven strategy for imposing communism.

On a tip from patthedog.

NYC Bureauweenies Outsource Reparations Moonbattery

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The Marxist bureauweenies presiding over the decline and fall of New York City are so useless that they have to outsource their own moonbattery.

The New York Post reports:

A city commission that costs taxpayers $5 million a year solely to study racial inequity has contracted out one of its main jobs — researching potential slavery reparations.

The Commission on Racial Equity — which consists of 15 members aided by at least a half-dozen paid staffers — last week issued a solicitation to find a vendor to create a report for it on “how wealth for the White population, key businesses, and NYC government grew as a result of enslaved African labor.”

Slavery was completely abolished in New York State 199 years ago.

A previous cost estimate put such a report at $1.5 million.

The money is meant to purchase pretexts to justify the redistribution of other people’s money on a racial basis. Liberals call this “anti-racism.”

It isn’t just NYC:

The state shelled out $5 million last year for a similar commission to look at reparations across New York.

That waste is nothing compared to the looting that will occur when liberals push reparations through.

On a tip from Jack D.

California Wastes Fortune on Dubious Workers’ Comp Claims

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Gavin Newsom’s $125 billion train to nowhere is not the only way the moonbats who rule California have of wasting taxpayer money. The New York Post reports on the looting that takes place via a state workers’ compensation program:

Called the Subsequent Injuries Benefits Trust Fund, the program provides extra benefits to employees covered by state workers’ compensation who sustain an on-the-job injury.

Such injuries evidently include not being able to achieve an erection — a problem that will become increasingly prevalent as California dissolves into liberalism. Payments of $1,700 per week for life are doled out for complaints like headache, allergies, acid reflux, and sexual dysfunction.

It didn’t used to be quite this crazy. But then the liberal courts stepped in.

The California Courts of Appeal decision required a generous interpretation of disability claims — spiking annual employer costs to between $2 billion and $3 billion, the audit noted.

Additionally, a growing backlog could push total liabilities past $20 billion within “a few years.”

Good thing other people’s money is free.

On a tip from R F.

Estimated Cost of Gavin Newsom’s Train to Nowhere Reaches Outrageous New Extreme

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To get an idea of how fast President Gavin Newsom would bankrupt the United States, consider his high-speed rail boondoggle.

The Daily Mail reports:

It was also supposed to cost just $33billion but Anthony Williams, a member of the state’s high speed rail board, said in a 60 Minutes interview that it will quadruple by the time it’s finished.

‘Today, we estimate with the right optimization just over $125billion. I think $126billion is the current estimate for that,’ Williams said.

‘That’s more funding than Amtrak has received in its history and still leaves a shortfall of roughly $90 billion.’

Other estimates are still higher:

In a press release, the DOT noted ‘the $135 billion projected total cost of the project could buy every San Francisco and LA resident nearly 200 roundtrip flights between the cities.’

Imagine how high the cost would climb if Newsom could print his own money.

On a tip from RoCar.

Gavin Newsom Allows Many $Billions in Welfare Fraud

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If Gavin Newsom really wanted to cut down on waste in California, instead of flushing $20 million down a consulting firm, he would stop allowing massive welfare fraud.

From City Journal:

From unemployment insurance and Medicaid to failed homeless initiatives and welfare programs, seemingly every state program has been compromised by criminals. The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.

The fraud has been out of control since barely a year after Newsom took office, when California’s tyrannical overreaction to Covid shut down the economy, throwing millions out of work while Newsom dined with his fellow rich moonbats at the French Laundry.

In response to the crisis, Newsom sought to dump pallets of cash across the state—as quickly as possible.

It was dumped largely into the pockets of fraudsters.

Not only did the state have some of the most generous welfare programs in the country; its bureaucrats had also failed to implement some basic fraud controls during Newsom’s tenure.

Scammers have been robbing California taxpayers from as far away as Romania. Others do it from Tennessee:

Around September 2020, Fontrell Antonio Baines, a rapper from Memphis known as Nuke Bizzle, released a music video on YouTube entitled “EDD.” In the song, Baines bragged about ripping off California’s UI [unemployment insurance] program. “Go to the bank with a stack of these,” Baines rapped, holding up EDD envelopes. Another rapper can be heard saying: “You gotta sell cocaine, I just file a claim.” All told, Baines obtained more than $700,000 in stolen funds using preloaded EDD debit cards.

Democrats know how to take care of their base.

California’s prison population apparently got in on the action, too: the EDD allegedly paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims in prisoners’ names, including those of at least 133 inmates on death row.

Covid was a looting spree:

State officials eventually admitted to having paid out approximately $20 billion in fraudulent claims during the pandemic, and to making an estimated $55 billion in improper payments.

Actual numbers are of course higher. According to fraud expert Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government,

“In California, at one point, you had more people applying for unemployment insurance benefits than you had people over the age of 18.”

The looting did not stop after Covid hysteria ran out of gas. Just considering the California implementation of Medicaid,

California’s attorney general has conceded that “Medi-Cal fraud could reach billions of dollars annually.”

That is to say, many billions.

Based on state experts’ best guesses of annual Medi-Cal expenditures and applying a conservative, 15 percent fraud rate to each fiscal year since 2019, Medi-Cal has lost some $146 billion in taxpayer funds to fraud on Gavin Newsom’s watch.

The fraud is too massive to ignore indefinitely. Democrats have been forced to respond — by making fraud even easier:

State Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas sponsored a bill that would raise the threshold for felony welfare fraud from $950 to $25,000. The measure would also make it more difficult to charge perjury based on misstatements to county welfare departments. Republican State Assemblyman Carl DeMaio has said that if the bill becomes law, it will effectively “legalize welfare fraud” in California.

Thanks to Trump being in office, the Feds are stepping in.

Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, announced the creation of a federal task force to combat fraud and corruption in the state’s homelessness programs. The task force has already brought charges in several multimillion-dollar homelessness-fraud cases—and Essayli has vowed that more are coming. “California has spent $24 billion in the last five years on homelessness, and no one can account for where that money has really gone,” Essayli said in January. Gavin Newsom, he added, is the “king of fraud.”

With fraud on this scale, it is no wonder California is crumbling and cannot pay its bills. But at least Democrats are innovative when it comes to finding new ways to confiscate other people’s money so they can waste it. For example, a San Francisco homeowner was fined $50,000 for trimming trees that required it:

On tips from abcanc and Wiggins.