{"id":31504,"date":"2012-08-14T09:09:23","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T13:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=31504"},"modified":"2012-08-14T09:18:21","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T13:18:21","slug":"good-stewardship-of-public-funds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=31504","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Good Stewardship of Public Funds&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember the recent brouhaha about the recent<a href=\"http:\/\/newsfeed.time.com\/2012\/04\/18\/gsa-scandal-so-what-does-823000-buy-you-in-las-vegas\/\"> GSA conference in Las Vegas that cost Uncle Sam $823+k<\/a>?\u00a0\u00a0 Well, that looks to have been chump change.\u00a0 Another agency has easily topped that.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently the VA also likes to hold conferences.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.navytimes.com\/news\/2012\/08\/fed-va-conferences-probe-081412\/\">As in holding two rather large conferences during the past year, at a total cost of at least $5M<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Large conferences have a purpose, I guess.\u00a0 And organizations do derive some benefits from periodic face-to-face meetings.<\/p>\n<p>But I have a rather hard time understanding how an organization with<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/8301-18563_162-57469804\/massive-veterans-affairs-backlog-leaves-half-a-million-waiting-for-benefits\/\"> a backlog of literally over a half-million claims pending action<\/a> can think that spending $5M annually on conferences is\u00a0 good stewardship of public funds.\u00a0 For that same $5M, the VA could have hired 100 additional employees at the GS11 or 12 grade level (including the normal +33% of salary for employer taxes\/benefits\/retirement) provided they hired locally and didn\u2019t have to pay PCS expenses.<\/p>\n<p>Priorities here just don\u2019t seem exactly as they should be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember the recent brouhaha about the recent GSA conference in Las Vegas that cost Uncle Sam &hellip; <a title=\"&#8220;Good Stewardship of Public Funds&#8221;\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=31504\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Good Stewardship of Public Funds&#8221;<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veterans-issues","category-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}