This cost American taxpayers an astounding $2 billion last year, according to figures released by the government agency—the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—that distributes the benefit. The information was originally obtained by a conservative news website that reports up to 25% of the $2 billion is untraceable because it’s distributed in cash and there’s no way to verify that the funds are actually spent on food.

The USDA does confirm, however, that an average of 1.37 million people received food stamps in Puerto Rico each month in fiscal year 2012. The island, which is a U.S. territory, has a population of 3.7 million, which means that 37% of Puerto Ricans get food stamps from Uncle Sam. Though the figure of 47.7 million in the U.S. shatters records, it still marks only 15.2% of the nation’s population of 313 million.

Nevertheless, the food stamp rolls continue to rise under President Obama who is committed to eradicating what he believes is a national epidemic of “food insecure” households. In 2012 the government spent an unprecedented $80.4 billion on the program, marking an unbelievable $2.7 billion increase from the previous year. The figure doesn’t even include other taxpayer-funded food programs for low-income populations like “Child Nutrition Programs” that received an additional $18.3 billion last year.

As is typical with these types of bloated government programs, fraud and corruption has tainted the USDA’s grocery giveaway. Just a few weeks ago Judicial Watch obtained documents from the USDA detailing how the agency is working with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal aliens in the U.S. food stamp program. The effort includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA ensuring that Mexicans in the U.S. don’t need to declare their immigration status to get financial assistance from Uncle Sam.

It turns out that illegal aliens have received food stamps by the vanload for decades, according to a former certification case worker who contacted J W after reading the documents. The retired assistant case manager, Craig McNees, was in charge of vetting food-stamp applicants in north Florida and Indiana in the ’80s and says the program was infested with fraud and corruption that was perpetually ignored by management. “Illegals would come in by the vanload and we were told to give them their stuff,” McNees said. “Management knew very well they were illegal. It was so rampant that some employees would tell their illegal relatives to come get food stamps.”

Previous to that JW has reported extensively on the fraud that has plagued the food-stamp program even as the Obama administration continues to promote it. For instance last spring the USDA Inspector General revealed that many food-stamp recipients use their welfare benefit to buy drugs, weapons and other contraband from unscrupulous vendors. Some trade food stamps for reduced amounts of cash. The fraud cost taxpayers nearly $200 million, according to the USDA watchdog, which provided various examples during testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

A separate federal audit revealed last year that many who don’t even qualify for food stamps receive them under a special “broad-based” eligibility program that disregards income and asset requirements. This is sticking American taxpayers with a multi-million-dollar tab to feed hundreds of thousands of people who can well afford to feed themselves.

The retired assistant case manager, Craig McNees, was in charge of vetting food-stamp applicants in north Florida and Indiana in the ’80s and says the program was infested with fraud and corruption that was perpetually ignored by management. “Illegals would come in by the vanload and we were told to give them their stuff,” McNees said. “Management knew very well they were illegal. It was so rampant that some employees would tell their illegal relatives to come get food stamps.”

McNees contacted Judicial Watch after reading documents obtained by JW from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) detailing how the agency is working with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal aliens in the U.S. food stamp program. The effort includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA ensuring that Mexicans in the U.S. don’t need to declare their immigration status to get financial assistance from Uncle Sam.

The documents ignited outrage considering the nation’s food stamp program has exploded under President Obama, who claims there are too many “food insecure households” in America. To correct the problem the administration has spent millions on ad campaigns promoting food stamps and has rewarded states with multi-million-dollar bonuses for signing up recipients. It’s been quite effective because American taxpayers spent an astounding $80.4 billion on the program in 2012 and a record number of people—46 million and growing—get free groceries from Uncle Sam.

The retired case worker who contacted JW says in the three years he worked in a Sarasota food-stamp office, he found more than 500 cases of fraud but management ignored them all instead pushing a yearly quota. “They just said that if we don’t give out as many as last year, we don’t get our money,” McNees said. “It was crazy, like a three-ring circus; like the inmates were running the asylum.”

Decades later it seems little has changed as Obama promotes the program like there’s no tomorrow. In fact, last summer a federal audit revealed that many who don’t qualify for food stamps receive them under a special “broad-based” eligibility program that disregards income and asset requirements. That means American taxpayers are getting stuck with a multi-million-dollar tab to feed hundreds of thousands who can well afford to feed themselves.

Adding insult to injury, last spring the USDA Inspector General revealed that many food-stamp recipients use their welfare benefit to buy drugs, weapons and other contraband from unscrupulous vendors. Some trade food stamps for reduced amounts of cash, the USDA watchdog told Congress, disclosing that the fraud has cost taxpayers nearly $200 million. None of this surprises McNees, who claims he witnessed so much fraud as a food-stamp case worker that he “could write a book.”

Yet in a lengthy piece the paper trashes the administration’s multi-billion-dollar reparation initiative to make amends to minority farmers who claim to be victims of government discrimination. It started with a historic $1.2 billion settlement with black farmers who say they were cheated out of federal aid because of their race. President Obama called it “another important step forward in addressing an unfortunate chapter in USDA’s civil rights history.”

Hispanic and women farmers quickly joined the bandwagon. Most of their discrimination claims were defeated in court, but Obama’s political appointees secretly “engineered” a generous reparation fund to compensate all minority farmers who fill out an online application claiming to be the victim of government discrimination. So the White House created a generous package for women and Hispanics that includes $1.33 billion in “compensation” and $160 million in “farm debt relief.”

To get the word out the feds launched an aggressive bilingual advertising and public relations campaign that includes national outreach tours by top USDA officials as well as Justice Department bigwigs because that agency is sort of overseeing it. The goal is to ensure that any Hispanic or woman farmer or rancher who alleges discrimination is aware of the money pot, according to the USDA official in charge of the program.

Predictably, the program has been rife with fraud and corruption and will end up costing American taxpayers an astounding $4.4 billion, according to the newspaper article. That’s because more than 90,000 people have filed claims and law firms stand to gain north of $130 million in fees. “From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie,” the article states. Why? “Because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm.”

It goes on to reveal that reviewers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the lead agency running the program, found “reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination.” Incredibly, those concerns were played down as the compensation effort actually grew!

One former USDA loan manager, a black man who reviewed thousands of claims over six years, said it was so easy to get cash from the government under this program that “I probably could have got paid.” He went on: ”You knew it was wrong, but what could you do?  Who is going to listen to you?” Here is another claim reviewer’s take on the scandal-plagued reparation fund:  ”Basically, it was a rip-off of the American taxpayers.”

In short, the true dimensions of the problem are impossible to gauge. Don’t expect any answers from the Obama administration, which promotes itself as the most transparent in history. Officially it had no comment for the article and those quoted in the story could only do so on the condition that they remained anonymous. The Justice Department official who supervised the cases, Acting Associate Attorney General Tony West, canceled an interview for the story and Attorney General Eric Holder declined to comment.

Just what Americans want to hear in the midst of a financial crisis and record unemployment! It involves a five-year plan to construct courthouses in various parts of the country. The Federal Judiciary and the General Services Administration (GSA) are in charge of the multibillion-dollar project, which has been slowed down by “fiscal challenges,” according to a federal audit released this week. That’s putting it mildly.

For example the Federal Judiciary told Congress that 12 courthouse projects would cost around $1 billion when in fact it will take a whopping $3.2 billion to finish the job. This means that the project masters likely planned to squeeze the extra $2.2 billion out of Congress mid construction, when lawmakers had little choice but to allocate the funds for completion. The audit, conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), flat out says that the document the judiciary uses to request money for courthouse construction projects “lacks transparency and key information” about their “cost.”

There is an official process that must be followed when the judiciary requests taxpayer dollars for these kinds of projects, which are known as capital planning. The goal, as it should be government-wide, is accountability and justification of proposed projects. In this case, 10 of the 12 courthouse projects would not even qualify for new construction under the court system’s own planning standards.

Evidently, that’s why the big brass at the judiciary concealed information from Congress and the American people. “The five-year plan submitted for approval of several billion dollars worth of projects — a one-page list of projects with limited and incomplete information — does not support the judiciary’s request for courthouse construction projects,” the GAO writes in its report.

This is not the first time that the Federal Judiciary gets blasted for its egregious spending sprees. Just last month the GAO issued a scathing report saying that the judiciary exceeded its congressionally authorized allotment for new courthouse space by 3.56 million square feet. This cost American taxpayers $835 million, according to the GAO, and an additional $51 million a year to rent, operate and maintain the facilities.

The problem had actually been identified years earlier in a separate federal audit, but the judiciary went full-throttle with the wasteful projects. In fact, in 2010 the GAO determined that 27 of 33 courthouses completed since 2000 exceeded their congressionally authorized size by a total of 1.7 million square feet. Instead of cutting back, the problem only got worse.

This week’s GAO report blasts the judiciary, albeit in a very diplomatic way, for lying to Congress to keep its monstrous courthouse construction project going. “As a result, there is a risk that congressional funding decisions could be made without complete and accurate information,” the report says.

Can you say government on steroids? It’s a crazy system in which a bloated government meddles in areas that it shouldn’t. This is done via federal regulations that, of course, require manpower and money to enforce. This costs U.S. taxpayers an astounding $1.75 trillion, an amount larger than all but eight of the world’s economies, according to a U.S. senator who is pushing for reform.  

It gets better; this means that more than 10% of the nation’s economy is spent on trying to satisfy rules issued by Washington bureaucrats, reveals the Senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. The heavy regulatory burden diverts resources from innovation to compliance, discourages business investment, and chills job creation, the lawmaker assures.  

“It is no accident that as Washington adds new regulations, more and more Americans are unemployed and underemployed,” Johnson says. He has called for a congressional investigation to identify ways to reduce these “regulatory burdens.” His suggestions are simple and include common sense. Among them is conducting retrospective reviews of existing regulations to measure results, benefits and costs.

This would allow agencies to revise or eliminate regulations that have been in place for years but aren’t working well or are having adverse consequences. In the past few years federal agencies have also gone on a manic rule-making frenzy, creating dozens of regulations that end up costing a chunk of change to enforce. It’s an insane system that’s only getting worse.

For instance, Senator Johnson reveals that from 2003 to 2010 agencies didn’t bother publishing Notices of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for about 35% of rules with a cost of $100 million or more. The number has nearly doubled since 1998, according to the senator, who stresses that the public has been unscrupulously left out of the process, which is supposed to allow comment/input on proposed regulations.

Under Obama the government has grown immensely and the expansion has inevitably created new rules and regulations. A few years ago the administration sponsored a contest promoting government regulations by offering a cash prize to the person who created the best video explaining the importance of federal rules. Contestants were asked to explain in a short video why rules are important, why the average American should care about federal regulations and how everyone can participate in the rulemaking process.

Even more enraging is that the government has long been aware that this is occurring but seems to have no sense of urgency to correct the problem or make any sort of reform. In fact, this week’s audit, released by the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), reveals that it has for years documented the outrageous waste in several different reports.

“In March 2011, we issued our first annual report in this series, which presented 80 areas where opportunities existed for executive branch agencies or Congress to reduce fragmentation, overlap, or duplication; achieve cost savings; or enhance revenue,” the GAO says. “In February 2012, we issued our second annual report, which identified an additional 51 areas. In these two reports, we have identified a total of approximately 300 actions that executive branch agencies and Congress could take to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government programs and activities.”

So, what has Uncle Sam done to address this serious spending issue? Not much, according to the GAO, which reveals that some areas have been “partially addressed” but others have been blown off all together. For instance, of the 300 actions required in a previous audit, only 65 were addressed while 149 were “partially addressed.” This seems to indicate that the frivolous spending spree will continue.

Here are some examples of the dozens of areas in which the government wastes your dollars through duplicative spending; three separate agencies conduct catfish inspections, 159 contracting organizations provide foreign-language support for the Department of Defense (DOD), a number of agencies are spending billions of dollars on new mapping data without bothering to check whether others already have a system that can be shared, 23 federal agencies have hundreds of programs to support renewable energy and each branch of the military is developing its own camouflage uniform.

The government can’t even find a way to share analytical and investigative information among various agencies, according to the GAO, and the overlapping efforts are costing a chunk of change. For instance, the departments of Justice and Homeland Security as well as the Office of National Drug Control Policy could coordinate among five types of field-based information sharing systems to support law enforcement and counterterrorism efforts. Instead, they each have their own costly system.

The report includes dozens of other examples and features charts and graphs that facilitate absorbing mountains of data collected in the course of the probe. “As the fiscal pressures facing the nation continue, so too does the need for executive branch agencies and Congress to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government programs and activities,” the GAO writes.

This isn’t something that’s been widely covered because most media lost interest after the last U.S. troops left Iraq in December of 2011. Nearly 5,000 U.S. service members died and more than 32,000 were wounded in the war—George W. Bush’s war—which lasted nearly nine years and cost north of $2 trillion, according to a recent study. The same study, released on the 10^th anniversary of the U.S. invasion, estimates that the cost could eventually top $6 trillion.

That extraordinary figure doesn’t even include reconstruction, but is rather limited to actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury during the war and future commitments such as the medical and disability claims of American veterans. An additional $60 billion has gone to post-war recovery, an ongoing initiative that has been plagued by scandal.

At least $8 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds has been wasted because of contracting abuses and mismanagement, according to the final report released by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR). The transitional watchdog has published hundreds of scathing reports over the years and this month released the grand finale, a painful 186-page exposé that includes many examples of the corruption that’s plagued U.S.-funded Iraq reconstruction efforts.

Here is how some of the money was spent; north of $15 billion went to projects that supposedly improved Iraq’s power and water supply, schools, and road and housing repairs. Around $9 billion went to health care, law enforcement and “humanitarian” assistance. Uncle Sam doled out $20 billion to re-equip Iraqi security forces and around $8 billion to enhance the rule of law and crackdown on narcotics. An additional $5 billion was blown on propping up Iraq’s economy.

So, what government agency is to blame for this atrocious multi-billion-dollar waste? The Department of Defense (DOD), according to the SIGIR. That’s because it practically controlled, or at least “held decisive sway” over 87% of the money. In short, the SIGIR writes in its last report that “the U.S. reconstruction program failed to meet its goals because of poor planning, indiscriminate priorities, and insufficient consultation with Iraqi authorities.”

Just last summer the SIGIR released an equally enraging audit estimating that at least $6 to $8 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds had been lost to fraud and waste. Furthermore, that probe revealed that the precise amount lost can never be known because of poor record-keeping. A number of other audits have exposed the ongoing abuse of taxpayer dollars in Iraq reconstruction efforts. 

Congress appropriated a whopping $51.4 billion to help the country recover from the war by, among other things, training local police, building schools, hospitals and transportation systems, but much of the money has literally vanished. The funds were allocated to the DOD, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), though the DOD—especially the Army—has been the leader in handling the money.

Over the years probes have revealed that lucrative contracts never got finished, weapons and sophisticated communication equipment can’t be accounted for and that an unused police housing camp with an Olympic-sized pool and lavish trailers still sits empty in Iraq. A few years ago the Pentagon admitted that lost 6.6 billion in cash that had been flown into Iraq in turboprop military cargo planes for post-invasion reconstruction! The money was bundled in chunks of $100 bills with each aircraft carrying about $2.4 billion. The inspector general referred to it as “the largest theft of funds in national history.”

Why is Indian graffiti worth preserving when local governments across the nation spend tens of millions of dollars to remove it annually? Because, evidently, this is politically correct graffiti that has a “social significance,” according to a National Park Service official quoted in a San Francisco newspaper. The agency cares for the island and financed the project at the infamous federal penitentiary in San Francisco.

The same official clarified that the National Park Service doesn’t approve of graffiti because “it’s a federal offense,” but this defacement has a history and sends a message. That’s because it involves Indians or Native Americans as the leftist movement likes to say. After the prison closed Indians took over the island and demanded the government convert it into an Indian cultural center or school devoted to native studies. The National Park Service dedicates a portion of its website to the movement.

During their Alcatraz occupation the Indians plastered a large sign—in red letters four and five-feet high—on the island’s huge water tank, which is about the size of a 10-story building. It reads: “PEACE AND FREEDOM WELCOME HOME OF THE FREE INDIAN LAND.” Rehabilitating it cost American taxpayers $1.5 million because the Park Service had to trace the outlines of the original signs and consult with the American Indian Movement and the Indian Treaty Council. It took nearly one year to complete the job.

The feds claim they approved the restoration because the sign honors “an important part of the island’s history.” The graffiti “opens your eyes to the Indian story of the island,” the Park Service official said. It’s not necessarily a positive one, according to the Park Service’s own version. There was “open use of drugs, fighting over authority, and general disarray of leadership,” as well as beatings and assaults. Some Indian occupiers stripped copper wiring and tubing from buildings and a fire destroyed several historic buildings.

 Even those who have never been to the state and have no association with it will contribute because federal lawmakers have essentially agreed to fund the project, which will end up costing a monstrous $68.4 billion to finish and hundreds of millions of dollars annually to operate and maintain. The high-speed rail system will run 520 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles and is scheduled to be completed by 2028.

The idea is to create an efficient passenger rail system similar to those that for decades have operated in Europe and Asia. Congress passed legislation in 2008 to fund this experiment and other improvements to the nation’s train system. California already got the biggest chunk—$3.5 billion—of money under the law for its high-speed rail project. The cash is coming mostly from President Obama’s fraud-infested $787 billion stimulus that was supposed to jump start the economy and put Americans back to work.

Now the Golden State needs to come up with at least $57 billion, according to a federal audit that determines the project “faces many challenges.” Only $11.5 billion have been secured from a combo of local, private and state investments, which means Uncle Sam must come to the rescue. The problem is that “federal funding is uncertain,” according to the audit, which was conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress.

It gets better; the probe also determined that the actual cost of completing the high-speed rail system will actually be even higher than the original estimate. That’s because it will likely fall behind schedule over things like legal challenges associated with environmental reviews and right-of-way acquisitions for construction. Additionally, ridership and revenue forecasts appear to be less than accurate, investigators found.

In short, this wasn’t thought out very well and like most government projects of this magnitude, the public will pay the hefty price for the bad decisions of inept officials. When all is said and done, more than 80% of the rail project’s total funding will come from government entities, the GAO says, and a large chunk will come from the feds. That means all Americans will on some level contribute to this disaster.

This has caused tremendous damage, according to the study, because the mainstream media has given these “fringe organizations” a forum to raise money and build “social networks within elite conservative circles.” So, essentially the public college professor has determined that conservatives and the mainstream media—notorious foes—have joined forces to trash Islam.

This is truly earth-shattering news! The alarming study was conducted by Christopher Bail, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which interestingly is the nation’s first public university. He used plagiarism detection software to track the influence of 1,084 press releases about Muslims from 120 organizations on more than 50,000 newspaper stories and television transcripts produced after the terrorist attacks in 2001 through 2008.

Bail found that organizations with negative messages about Muslims “captivated the mass media” after the 9/11 attacks resulting in the spreading of negative messages that stoke public fears about Muslims. “They are now so much a part of the mainstream that they have been able to recast genuinely mainstream Muslim organizations as radicals,” the professor said in an announcement promoting his study.

Could he be referring to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a national group that serves as the U.S. front for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas? CAIR bills itself as the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy organization but is described by FBI counterterrorism experts as an entity that promotes and finances terrorism. CAIR has extensive links to foreign and domestic Islamists, was a co-conspirator in a federal terror-finance case involving the Hamas front group Holy Land Foundation and is largely funded by Islamic terrorist-supporting countries. In fact, CAIR was founded in 1994 by three Middle Eastern extremists (Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad and Rafeeq Jaber) who ran the American propaganda wing of Hamas, known then as the Islamic Association for Palestine.

Judicial Watch has investigated CAIR for its role in the Holy Land Foundation scandal and last year sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) for records related to the agency’s decision not to prosecute the group, likely for political reasons. Special agents of the FBI and federal prosecutors in Texas objected to the Obama DOJ’s decision not to prosecute CAIR, which has been linked by government investigators to Hamas. Press releases provided to the media about this case certainly would be viewed as hostile towards Muslims in the North Carolina professor’s study.

Here’s another one; earlier this year JW sued the FBI for records detailing a secret February 2012 meeting with Director Robert Mueller and a coalition of Islamist organizations that swayed the agency to purge training curricula deemed offensive to Muslims. Some of the organizations that met with Mueller at FBI headquarters have ties to radical terrorist organizations, according to some news reports and Americans have a right to know who they are.