Wasteful Spending | featured news

A new report says the U.S. health care system squanders $750 billion a year - roughly 30 cents of every medical dollar... But the counter-intuitive finding from the report is that deep cuts are possible without rationing, and a leaner system may even produce better quality.

President Obama fought back against Republican criticism over Medicare today, saying he has improved the program by eliminating wasteful spending. "Here's what you need to know -- I have strengthened Medicare," Obama told supporters in Dubuque, Iowa, on the third and final day of his bus tour of the state.

Nearly 100 General Services Administration employees, many of them high-ranking, claimed more than $750,000 in travel expenses in a nine-month period, despite the fact that they were assigned to work from home.

Republican lawmakers tried Tuesday to tie the spending scandal at the General Services Administration to the White House, pressing current and former agency officials to explain why they met with senior administration officials more than a week before disciplining most of the implicated officials.

A video unearthed by congressional investigators has added fuel to an already raging fire over the General Services Administration’s lavish spending on employee perks and agency conferences.

Remember the furor over $16 muffins? That's nothing compared with the $100-plus per-person reception that featured 400 pieces of $4.75 "Petit Beef Wellington," 400 "Mini Monte Cristo Sandwiches" at $5 each and 1,000 sushi rolls for $7 apiece, as well as other "excessive and wasteful" spending at a General Services Administration conference in the Las Vegas area in 2010.

It's an outrageous tale: The federal government spends one out of every $10 in transportation aid on wasteful projects such as refurbishing a giant roadside coffee pot and constructing turtle tunnels.

As the U.S. government grapples to find ways to trim the bloated federal deficit, a new report suggests officials might start with cutting out $16 muffins and $10 cookies.

On Washington state's remote and wooded Olympic Peninsula, major commotion is usually limited to a log tumbling off an overloaded lumber truck. But lately the peninsula has been roiled by a noisy debate over the expansion of a Border Patrol station in Port Angeles, a three-hour car and ferry ride away from the U.S.-Canadian land border.

As much as $60 billion in U.S. tax dollars has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade due to lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption, according to an independent panel....