Sherry Chandler

Unintended Consequences

If you give your child a Rolls Royce, you might want to consider whether s/he will have the money necessary to run it or whether s/he’ll have to live in it. From the Washington Post:

In 2003, the FBI used a $25 million grant to give bomb squads across the nation state-of-the-art computer kits, enabling them to instantly share information about suspected explosives, including weapons of mass destruction.

Four years later, half of the Washington area’s squads can’t communicate via the $12,000 kits, meant to be taken to the scene of potential catastrophes, because they didn’t pick up the monthly wireless bills and maintenance costs initially paid by the FBI. Other squads across the country also have given up using them.

“They worked, and it was a good idea — until the subscription ran out,” said Mike Love, who oversees the bomb squad in Montgomery County’s fire department. At the local level, he said, “there is not budget money for it.”

And while we’re talking about unintended consequences, remember when we used to congratulate ourselves that America’s bread basket could feed the world? Turns out the world would like to feed itself but that would be a loss of money for charities and government subsidy for our agribusiness:

MALELA, Kenya — CARE, one of the world’s biggest charities, is walking away from some $45 million a year in federal financing, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.

CARE’s decision is focused on the practice of selling tons of often heavily subsidized American farm products in African countries that in some cases, it says, compete with the crops of struggling local farmers.

…

Under the system, the United States government buys the goods from American agribusinesses, ships them overseas, mostly on American-flagged carriers, and then donates them to the aid groups as an indirect form of financing. The groups sell the products on the market in poor countries and use the money to finance their antipoverty programs. It amounts to about $180 million a year.

Some irony in this situation, given the American scorn for welfare and its recipients.

And then there’s the Bush administration Catch 22:

In both cases, the government said the plaintiffs’ evidence was insufficient to establish standing to sue, adding that even litigating the matter would endanger national security. “Whether plaintiffs were subjected to surveillance is a state secret,” the Justice Department said in a recent brief in the Haramain case, “and information tending to confirm or deny that fact is privileged.”

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