This is from ABC News.
Billboard Boondoggle? Obama Administration Halts Globe-Trotting Trips for Bureaucrats
By MATTHEW MOSK, BRIAN ROSS (@brianross) and ANNA SCHECTERA $1.2 million federal highway program that sent employees on a 17-day globe-trotting journey to photograph different billboards was suspended Tuesday — an announcement that came after ABC News alerted the U.S. Department of Transportation that it planned to air a report on the program.
“The president has been clear: We must get rid of stupid spending and pointless waste,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in an emailed statement to ABC News. “Each taxpayer dollar is precious, and there is no excuse for wasting a single one. That’s why … I have suspended this program.”
LaHood said he directed the Federal Highway Administration to shut down this program until further notice “while I personally review the way taxpayer dollars have been spent.”
A transportation official said Tuesday night that the decision had been made weeks ago to include it in future cuts, and was not in response to ABC News questions.The bad news is this is an on-going program, it is not new with this administration.
The initiative, known as the International Scan Program, has been sending federal and state transportation employees to popular foreign tourist destinations for the past decade with the goal of studying how other countries handle the challenges of running major highway networks. Other trips have been planned to study such issues as motorcycle safety, managing pavement, precast concrete, and adapting to climate change. But the program began prompting questions in recent weeks, as members of Congress learned that a group of transportation officials traveled around the globe – a nine city tour that took them to Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Great Britain — in order to prepare a 76-page report about policies for dealing with billboard advertising. …
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.And this was not a one-time occurrence. The program has been sending groups of federal and state workers on similar trips as often as four times a year for the past decade, at a total cost of nearly $12 million.
Read it all, then wonder how many more programs are wasting money like this. We can thank the people at Citizens Against Government Waste for starting the investigation into this.