Rural Utilities Service Agency : Just Another Waste of Money?

I wonder how different this 'obscure' agency is then all of the rest that got their hands on the $852 billion that the Obama administration rolled out in 2009 for roads and bridges, you know, shovel ready projects that would create thousands of jobs.

Oh wait, it didn't happen as Mr Obama admitted ,but the money seemed to have gone someplace. O well, Stimulus 2 and 3 soon followed and that money disappeared as well and what exactly was accomplished with nearly a $trillion taxpayer dollars spent?

General Motors was saved from bankruptcy and it's union members - state governments were able to keep 100's of thousands of public employees from being laid off and were then able to keep voting for the hand that feeds them, democrats.

The fact the Rural Utilities Serve is incompetent is bad for sure, but lets go to the source of the corruption to find answers.

Wired to Fail
Source: Tony Romm, "Wired To Fail," Politico, July 28, 2015.

August 17, 2015

A Politico investigation found that roughly half of the nearly 300 projects the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) approved as part of the 2009 Recovery Act have not yet obligated the full amounts they were awarded.

• All RUS-funded infrastructure projects were supposed to have completed construction by the end of June, but the agency has declined to say whether these rural networks have been completed.
• More than 40 of the projects RUS initially approved never got started at all, raising questions about how RUS screened its applicants and made its decisions in the first place. 

If these networks do not draw all their cash by the end of September, they will have to forfeit what remains. In other words, they may squander as much as $277 million in still-untapped federal funds, which can\'t be spent elsewhere in other neglected rural communities.

Either way, many rural residents who should have benefited from better Internet access -- a utility that many consider as essential as electricity -- might continue to lack access.  Even RUS admits it\'s not going to provide better service to the 7 million residents it once touted; instead, the number is in the hundreds of thousands.

The checkered performance of RUS offers an all-too-familiar story of an obscure federal agency that has grown despite documented failures, thanks in large part to its political patrons in Congress.
"We are left with a program that spent $3 billion," says Mark Goldstein, an investigator at the Government Accountability Office, "and we really don\'t know what became of it."