The current occupant's administration has trouble holding onto things. Billions in cash in Iraq. Secret identities of CIA operatives. The budget surplus.
Now comes news that we seem to have lost track of 600,000 fugitives.
Uh, oops.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Teams assigned to make sure foreigners ordered out of the United States actually leave are grappling with a backlog of more than 600,000 cases and can't accurately account for the fugitives' whereabouts, the government reported Monday.
The report by the Homeland Security Department's inspector general found that the effectiveness of teams assigned to find the fugitives was hampered by "insufficient detention capacity, limitations of an immigration database and inadequate working space."
Even though more than $204 million was allocated for 52 fugitive operations teams since 2003, a backlog of 623,292 cases existed as of August of 2006, the report said.
For cryin' out loud, is there anything the Executive Branch manages these days that they don't either screw up, lie about or both? All this talk about "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" is so much crap. Here we are, having identified over half a million bad guys, and we, I guess, tell them they need to leave the country if they don't mind, and then... what? Just wave at them?
Smart-assiness aside, what really is troubling is that the backlog of cases, originally thought to be eliminated by 2009, is now looking more like it will take until 2012.
And then there's that whole darn accountability thing...
"The current reporting system does not provide a means by which managers can assess teams' performance," the inspector general concluded. That makes it impossible to determine if the teams are meeting their goals, the report said.
sigh