Denali Commission
Federal employee Mike Marsh is pretty sure his job shouldn't exist. So he wrote to Congress (and The Washington Post):
"I have concluded that [my agency] is a congressional experiment that hasn't worked out in practice," wrote Marsh, who is the inspector general for the Denali Commission, an economic-development agency based in Alaska. "I recommend that Congress put its money elsewhere."… Marsh believes there is a strong and convincing case for his own unemployment. He laid it out in seven pages, complete with graphics and a bibliography, and sent it to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and to the Office of Management and Budget.
You can read the whole letter here, but The Washington Post sums up Marsh's attitude about his own IG gig and the office he oversees with the useful phrase "human boondoggle."
So how much money are we talking about?:
The Denali Commission began in 1998, as a pet project of then-Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)…. The commission's purpose was to help people in rural Alaska, by building power plants, offering job training and improving health care. It became the channel for a great river of pork. In 2006, in the heyday of both Stevens and congressional earmark spending, he sent $150 million flowing through the agency.
That flow has slowed considerably since Stevens died. This year's appropriation was "just" $10.6 million.
For more on our federal budget, from which there is "nothing left to cut," go here.
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