May 19, 2012
It wasn’t quite that bad, but it was pretty close. A front page Washington Post story told readers that:
“The overpayments, discovered in an inspector general’s audit, boosted the annual pay of some of the employees [some of four employees] by as much as $64,000.”
I will be the last person to defend people ripping off the government, but we do need some context here. Assuming a worst case scenario, the amount of overpayments to these government employees amounted to less than $200,000 a year. That comes to less than 0.000006 percent of federal spending. Is this worth a front page story in the Washington Post?
My guess is that if we looked at any major defense contractor (e.g. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman) we could probably find overpayments that are at least ten times as large with a careful examination of every major contract. Such stories can rarely be found on the front page of the Washington Post.
Readers might ask why the Post thinks it is so important to highlight overpayments to a small number of government employees that, for all practical purposes, have zero consequence for the budget while neglecting much larger abuses by government contractors.
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