Unsurprisingly, the Time magazine article by Mark Thompson takes a negative view of the Navy and how they waste money, while failing to take the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ie, Stimulus, Porkulus) to task
Washington was buzzing last week with the news that Solyndra LLC, a California solar-energy firm with ties to the Obama White House, had gone belly up – after pocketing a half-billion loan from the federal government. Seems the Navy also has been suffering from fiscal sunstroke, to judge from a just-released Pentagon inspector general probe.
It’s the oldest story in government: when there’s pressure to spend money, it will be spent, and not always wisely. The Navy, and other services, have been under pressure from the Obama Administration and Congress to try to jump-start the moribund economy by pumping funds into various projects under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – otherwise known as the stimulus. The IG report looked into the Navy’s funding of several photovoltaic – PV – projects, designed to turn sunshine into electricity.
And you know what they found out?
During project planning and selection, officials did not consider whether projects were cost-effective or analyze different types of energy projects to determine the best investments for meeting legislative energy goals. Instead, they relied upon project titles, location, cost, and amount of time to award contracts to select projects. Officials incorrectly concluded that cost effectiveness was not required for planning Recovery Act energy projects.
Mark goes on, whining about the military being a “state-operated monopoly”, (and whines some more about the military at the end) without mentioning the other state run monopolies, or the other waste in the Recovery Act, and we get
…the Navy and Marine Corps did not have processes for completing life-cycle cost analyses, processes for planning and selecting all energy projects, or energy strategies for achieving legislative goals. As a result, the Department of the Navy will not recover $25.1 million of the $50.8 million invested in PV projects
So, another $25.1 million wasted on a “green” project, because there was no need for cost effectiveness in the Recovery Act. Might not seem like much money in Washington, but, out in the real world, that’s a nice chunk of change.
Fortunately, the DOE is about to waste another $105 million in “loans” for a cellulosic ethanol company, which will make ethanol from corn waste. I’m sure that at no time did the thought “hey, corn based ethanol drives up the price of food, it uses lots of water to make, it provides little power, it isn’t really good for auto engines, and it puts out more greenhouse gases than oil, oh, and it is a waste of money” never crossed the minds of those at the DOE.
