Federal Loaned Executives Live Large on Money Intended for Charity

20 May, 2014 by Dave Blount

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When you want to help the poor, do you choose to donate your hard-earn money through a church, run by people devoted to God, or through private charities that climb into bed with Big Government? If you are having a hard time deciding, this story might help:

Federal employees and a contractor diverted more than $1 million of charitable contributions to spending on themselves for in-office massages, meals at every meeting and other luxuries and unnecessary expenses, a government audit found.

They called themselves “volunteers” and said they needed “motivation” to help the less fortunate, even though some 41 federal workers were being paid full-time salaries to administer just one local chapter of the government’s annual workplace charity drive, the Combined Federal Campaign.

They arrived a day early and stayed a day late for annual training conferences in New Orleans and Las Vegas, and paid for room service and pay-per-view movies with donated funds. Then, they adamantly defended their right to do so when questioned by auditors.

They even hired lawyers to defend this supposed right.

They claimed that restrictions on spending for things like first-class flights didn’t apply to donated funds because taxpayer money was not involved.

But it isn’t only people who donate voluntarily who get shafted:

The whole time they were working on the CFC full-time, these “loaned executives” received full government salaries, and were able to ignore the work they were originally hired by agencies to do.

Good thing the majority of federal employees don’t do any necessary work anyway.

The CFC contracts with private nonprofit groups like the conspicuously extravagant Global Impact to provide personnel, who as noted remain on salary at taxpayer expense. The federal government is the last place you want to acquire personnel, because the prevailing mentality of the bureaucracy under Obama is an aprÃ¨s nous le déluge looting spree, as we have seen repeatedly.

The purpose of the federal government is simple: defend the border at all times and project American power abroad when necessary. Anything else it touches, it poisons with corruption and incompetence. This goes double for helping the poor, just as it does for healthcare.