In a recent email from Vice President Joe Biden, the White House chose, among the umpteen thousand examples of government waste, a federally funded Desert Tortoise website as its whipping-boy to highlight what it considers wasteful government spending in its "Campaign to Cut Waste".
There's a New Sheriff in Town - The White House Blog
I bet you didnit know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I'm sure it's a wonderful species, but we canât afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. It's just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.
This kind of waste is just unacceptable. Particularly at a time when we're facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it's a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.
I found this via a post on Chris Clarke's Coyote Crossing - A note for future historians if Obama loses in 2012 - and must say I couldn't agree more:
It's a small stupid thing, but it just reinforces the fundamental dishonesty of this administration. This is the website he's talking about. It's a low-budget website. The money involved in putting it together has already been spent. The only reason to get rid of it is that it works to promote appreciation for an endangered species that the Administration has decided stands in the way of its policies being enacted.
When the White House uses it's staff time and outreach dollars to in effect
steal its former political opponents anti-endangered species stump-speech talking point, highlighting money spent on conserving endangered species as wasteful - something is very wrong.
What's more, the tiny website the White House is talking about was put together under Gale Norton's watch with the Bush Administration, casting doubt on the recent LA Times editorial's hesitation to take the gloves off in comparing Obama to Bush:
It's probably going too far to say that former president and onetime oilman George W. Bush was a better conservationist than President Obama. But they're not as far apart as most people think.
What's particularly ludicrous about the direction the White House is taking is that there are real waste's of government taking place - wasteful spending that destroys and diminishes the environmental heritage our kids are entitled to.
Consider Welfare Ranching:
Assessing the Full Cost of the Federal Grazing Program
Hess and Wald (1995) estimated $500 million per year for the full net cost to the Treasury of the federal grazing program including direct and indirect costs. Jacobs (1991) estimated that the full cost to taxpayers from all federal, state and local government programs approached $1 billion annually. Considering the many federal and non-federal indirect costs and other intangible ecological and social costs, the full cost to the public of the federal grazing program is most likely to lie in the range of these earlier estimates of $500 million to $1 billion.
Despite these remarkable shortfalls in receipts received for grazing permits versus federal dollars expended on the grazing program and associated activities made necessary to administer it, the
Obama Administration recently refused to reform the public lands grazing fee:
Conservation organizations submitted a petition in 2005, asking the government to address the grazing fee formula and adjust the fee in order to cover the costs of the federal grazing program, which costs taxpayers at least $115 million [direct] dollars annually according to a Government Accountability Office report. Conservationists contend that Americans lose even more in compromised wildlife habitat, water quality, scenic views, and native vegetation.
"Campaign to Cut Waste" ?
This administration's priorities on cutting waste are way off the mark. There is ample opportunity to cut hundreds of millions in subsidizes to large corporate livestock production entities - an activity which pushes as many species toward extinction as logging and mining combined - just by charging closer to market value for the public resources leased to private parties.
Instead, this Administration is content to cut or consolidate a modest website of which in all likelihood more federal dollars were spent preparing and publicizing Vice President Joe Biden's criticism than it took to development the site itself.
Crossposted from The Wildlife News
10:27 PM PT: A follow up post on Chris Clark's Coyote Crossing reveals how much (or little) the website that the White House chose to criticize as waste actually costs:
What does the Desert Tortoise Website actually cost?
A source with detailed knowledge of the Desert Managers Group and its budget (which should after all be public information) tells me that the total annual cost of operating the website at deserttortoise.gov is $125.00, plus eight hours of staff time. Per year.