Federal Government Funds Studies to Study if Studies Are Wasteful
The Pentagon was inundated with so many studies in 2010 that it commissioned a study to determine how much it cost to produce all those studies.
Now the Government Accountability Office has reviewed the Pentagon’s study and concluded in a report this week that it’s a flop.
The study of a study of studies began in 2010 when Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained that his department was “awash in taskings for reports and studies.” He wanted to know how much they cost.
Two years later, the Pentagon review is still continuing, which prompted Congress to ask the GAO to look over the Pentagon’s shoulder. What they found lacked military precision.
Via ABC News.
Yea, you can’t make up stuff like this and I think no one is shocked that a government study on if there are too many studies can’t determine a conclusion but can’t determine how much they spent to study how much they spent …
23 May 2012
6 Comments
My favorite is the study that not only was headlining our local news, but that was also in Time & Newsweek – that the perception of “old” depends on your age. (i.e.: if you’re 5 yrs. old, 20 seems old, and if you’re 20 years old, 35 seems old….) Really? We not only needed a study for that, but the results were newsworthy? Wonder how much THAT study cost…
I can recall a government study several decades ago with a title something like “The Effects of Injuries to Children Caused By Tri-Vehicular Accidents”. The conclusion of the study was that most injuries were caused when the “Tri-Vehicle” (Think “-Cycle”) tipped over. Doh!!
But a positive effect was the introduction of the “Big Wheel” made almost entirely of plastic and was so low to the ground that most motorists couldn’t see them when they were accidentally ridden into the street. Doh !!
“Since the mid-1990s, the Maryland State Highway Administration and the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) have been working in partnership to assess a series of multi-modal improvements in Montgomery and Frederick Counties as part of the I-270/US 15 Multi-Modal Corridor Study.”
This “study” has been on-going for 20 years and as far as I know, not one shovel has yet to be put in the ground, nor are there any plans to do any actual construction work at this time, just more “study”. Partisan politics aside, non-sense like this is the ruin of this country for our generation and the one after it and the one after it…
The pathetic part about the government is that wasting money is ENCOURAGED. I am serious about this. Government offices get allocated money for a year. If they don’t spend all of that money, they get their budged reduced the following year. Not spending all the money is something people get punished for. You would think you would get rewarded for actually saving the taxpayers money. That isn’t the case. Congress can talk all the noise they do about balancing the budget. It will never happen until they change this absurd culture of encouraging spending.
Gotta love government studies!
I heard one said that TakeFive readers are 53% more likely to buy Cars, but I have no idea where they’re getting that from.
(MET: There was a study on why prisoners in jail wanted to escape).
I remember a study here in Canada last year that determined that a commission to study wasteful spending by commissions spent 10 million dollars and there was never one person attached to the commission….