$815 Million Seemingly Missing from Obama's America

$815 Million Seemingly Missing from Obama’s America

By Ben Marquis
on August 4, 2017 at 1:50pm

Few could argue with a straight face that former President Barack Obama and his administration didn’t have a spending problem, often creating government programs seemingly just for the sake of spending more taxpayer money, regardless of where it went or what it was used for.
Thus, we were only slightly stunned to read a recent report from the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General that revealed that at least $815 million in grant money for land purchases had been doled out between 2014 and 2015 with absolutely no way to track the funds or ensure that they had been used for their intended purpose.
From the start, the report made clear that the DOI “does not centrally track information about grants awarded for the purpose of acquiring land. As such, DOI is unable to identify how much grant money has been used to purchase land, how much land has been purchased, and whether that land is being used for its intended purpose.”
It should be noted that the land purchased by virtue of these grants of taxpayer money are not considered federally-owned land, but are owned by the grantee, albeit with stipulations in place that the grantee is supposed to honor, such as preserving land intended for conservation or otherwise using the land for a specific intended purpose.
Unfortunately, due to the lack of a centralized system for tracking such purchases, the DOI quite simply has no idea where the money went or what it was ultimately spent on.
The OIG investigation surveyed some 108 DOI programs that issue grants for land purchases, and focused in on 16 of those programs for a closer look. From those 16 programs, there were 701 grants issued for land purchases over a two-year period, totaling about $815 million. The report made clear that actual amounts across the entirety of the board are most likely many times higher than what was revealed.

 However, it was found that some of those grants had been issued to purchase land that had not been properly appraised according to national standards, nor were all of the grant recipients reporting back to the granting agencies their inventory or proof of purchase and compliance, as is required by law.
In fact, less than 44 percent of grant recipients had followed through on keeping the department informed of the purchase, or with proof that the land was being used as intended.
The report ultimately identified that there was a major monitoring gap in federally funded land purchases, which created ample opportunity for waste, fraud, and abuse.
As such, they recommended the department implement a standardized and uniform system for tracking land purchases with federal grants, as well as develop further guidance informing recipients of their responsibilities to report pertinent information back to the granting agencies, as is required by law.
President Donald Trump often railed against wasteful federal spending while on the campaign trail, and his administration has been making efforts to cut back on such waste while in office. Moreover, his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke appears to be fully on board with that specific agenda. We feel confident that the appropriate changes will be made, and this sort of haphazard doling out of federal funds with no follow up that took place under Obama will soon come to an end.