While conflicted "pundits" decry the cuts in the Obama budget, more thoughtful analysts are beginning to read between the lines. The President has proposed to cut 126 programs to save $23 billion--not a lot of cash, but a lot of interesting fodder for those with the spare time to research why they were there in the first place, who runs them, and most often, who was "on the take". Orzack seems to have ferreted out a real nest of worthless crony projects. Listen carefully--that scurrying is the sound of rats looking for another ship to land on!
"We thought it would be easy," says the director of the "Virtual Border Fence." The Bush Administration knew it was total failure three years ago but of course no one thought of cancelling it until now.
The Department of Homeland Security "virtual fence" project, being built by Boeing, is in big, big trouble. The virtual fence is a high-tech network of cameras, lighting, sensors, and technology designed to intercept illegal border crossings. According to the Wall Street Journal: "Boeing Co. has changed the management of an electronic-surveillance project along the U.S.-Mexican border after falling more than two months behind schedule, marking the complications involved in setting up a new generation of border security."
Director of this boondoggle, Jerry McElwee, is part of the Boeing Political Action Committee which has already spent over $1 million on the 2010 elections, the bulk to Republicans. (Although Dodd is high on the list along with Kirk and Boehner).
In his book I Am America and So Can You, Stephen Colbert seems to have correctly identified the purpose of the border fence project: "To keep our minds off of how many illegal immigrants are coming through airports."
Then there is the NASA "return to the moon" project, cancelledin this proposal.
The president's budget is critical of NASA's Constellation program, which had been under way since 2004 and has spent $9 billion developing new rockets and spacecraft for a planned 2020 return to the moon, and later trips to Mars. The program was behind schedule and over budget, the president's proposal notes, and had drawn money away from other NASA programs, including robotic space exploration, science, and Earth observation.
The ultimate goal of the project seems to have been profit--inevitably directed toward a lunar "Halliburton." Leaders of private firms like former Republican U.S. Senator Harrison Schmidt have been pushing commercial mining there, including helium 3. (Schmidt is a geologist and a notorious global warming denier.) But the project never got off the ground, in spirit or fact. The rocket, J-2X, was underpowered from the outset and would never have worked. One of the keys here seems to have been keeping NASA's collective mind off of climate change observations!
And in West Virginia, cuts to support for mountaintop removal permitting sent even the Democratic rep into orbit (possibly a cheap research option for NASA.)
While cuts like these are probably more political theater than reality given the horse trading that passes for legislating these days, they make interesting reading. Anyone out there have more insights into the nests that are slowly being discovered?