by Rusty Pugh and Jim Brown
(AgapePress) – Recent documentation has revealed massive waste, fraud, and accounting errors in the U.S. Department of Education. One congressman says it is time to shut down this “out of control spending machine.”
The Department of Education was created in the late 1970s by President Jimmy Carter. Recently, Department Inspector General Lorraine Lewis revealed that almost half-a-billion taxpayer dollars had been lost with no accountability. Among Lewis’ findings: employees writing checks totaling millions of dollars without supervision; grant money in the form of checks totaling $250 million was issued twice to the same recipients on more than 20 occasions; and employees would go on personal spending sprees using government credit cards.
This alone, done without approval of supervisors, accounted for millions of dollars. Congressman Charlie Norwood of Georgia says it is time to shut this department down.
“With the amount of money that is being misplaced over there, it would be proper to close the department down, put everybody on administrative leave, fill the department back up with auditors, and find out what’s going on over there,” Norwood says. “That’s what any good company would do. When you’re talking about $450 million that have simply gone out the window, you need to take serious steps to correct that.”
During the period the Department of Education has been in existence, the problems in public schools have worsened, not improved. Statistics released in April show that 63% of black fourth graders in the United States can barely read at all, and 60% percent of all poor children in America read well below the basic level.
The new Secretary of Education, Roderick Paige, told Fox News that after spending $125 billion in Title I money, the federal government has achieved basically nothing in poor school districts.
President Bush’s education bill that recently passed the Senate with a 91-8 vote allows for a $9.2 billion increase in funding for the Department of Education. Democrats on Capitol Hill had called for a $15 billion increase.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
