New Members of the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame…or a Great Moment in Government Waste

Daniel J. Mitchell | 

Which nation has the most costly bureaucracy?
Well, if the answer is based solely on how much it costs to employ bureaucrats, you can see from this chart that Denmark comes in first place.
As an American taxpayer, I’m glad to learn that there are other nations that squander more money on civil servants.
But I get the feeling that the crowd in Washington is miffed that the United States didn’t wind up at the top of the list.
I’m being satirical, of course, but that’s what came to mind because is seems that our political masters are doing everything possible to waste money on needless bureaucracy.
For instance, here are some disturbing details for a report published by CNBC.

The federal government has a serious problem keeping tabs on its employees, from an FCC worker watching porn while at work, to DHS employees collecting overtime pay to sit on Netflix or talk on the phone. And now, a new report from the Patent and Trademark Office found that at least 19 paralegals have been getting paid $60,000 to $80,000 a year to sit on Facebook, online shop and watch TV — costing taxpayers about $5.1 million in the last four years. Even more egregious — the auditors said managers looked the other way and billed the hours under “other time” while also giving each of the workers thousands of dollars worth of performance bonuses during that same time period. The managers “were completely aware of the volume of ‘other time’ hours during the relevant time frame and took little action to prevent such waste,” the IG said. The auditors said one manager even dubbed the billing code the “I don’t have work but I’m going to get paid code.” …The report said “nonproductive time” racked up to between 50 and 70 hours in an 80-hour pay period.

But let’s be fair to the bureaucrats.
The story says they were goofing off because nobody gave them any work.

Whistleblowers told auditors that the paralegals just didn’t have enough work to do, so they spent their time doing other things — some even volunteered for charity organizations while clocked in at the Patent and Trademark Office. …whistleblowers said the paralegals rely on judges to assign them work and there weren’t enough judges on staff to assign new cases.

Or maybe the judges are lazy and inefficient, which is not exactly an unknown trait inside government.
In any event, the most outrageous part of the story is that the bureaucrats at the Patent and Trademark Office were given thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. For what?!? Doing a superlative job of watching TV?!?

Though I must admit this isn’t as bad as the bureaucrats at the Veterans Administration, who gave themselves bonuses while letting veterans languish and die on secret waiting lists.
And to add insult to injury, the bureaucrats at the Patent and Trademark Office (and their lazy and inefficient bosses) work at a luxurious new taxpayer-financed “campus” in suburban Virginia.
As the old saying goes, nice work if you can get it.
Though “work” is obviously a gross overstatement.
The bottom line is that we have a bureaucracy that is far too big and costs far too much.
P.S. Not only does Denmark have the most expensive bureaucrats, it’s also home to “Lazy Robert,” who is a proud member of the Moocher Hall of Fame (and doubtlessly also a passenger on the Party Boat).
P.P.S. I’ve shared more anti-libertarian humor than pro-libertarian humor, so it’s time to impose some balance. Here’s something I just saw on Twitter.