BioWatch Boondoggle

 Dear Mr. President,

The latest census report shows that just under 50 million Americans, 16% of the population, were living in poverty in 2010. Undoubtedly, there’s many more than that now. In LA, 10 courts are being shut down because of a lack of funds. And in the same paper this morning—the LA Times—there’s an article about Homeland Security (HSD) refusing to turn over to the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested documents to assess the effectiveness of yet another HSD boondoggle, a project called BioWatch. BioWatch was supposed to monitor the air in cities to detect pathogens—i.e., a biological attack. Woo-Hoo! yet another phantom threat we’ve got to protect against. The idea was to mount gizmos on the roofs of buildings suck air through their filters, change filters every day and forward the samples to testing labs for analysis. No mention of how much has already been spent on this, but it’s becoming apparent that the gizmos don’t work and the results are totally unreliable. The only mention of cost is that HSD wants another $3.1 billion for a makeover of the project with new gizmos that might work. Seems there’s conflicting testimony as to whether the project ever yielded any worthwhile information or not. Granted, the House Committee is led by Republicans who want to discredit anything and everything to do with your administration, but still, Mr. President, isn’t a government agency supposed to turn over information requested by a House oversight committee? Or did you summarily change that rule too? This project sounds like just another waste of taxpayer money in the name of national security, akin to that other HSD boondoggle, the Fusion program, a whole sub-branch of HSD with no useful function or usable results but employing a whole bunch of people. BioWatch is pretty hi-tech, kinda’ space-agey, but there’s something called the law of diminishing returns and it sounds like this is a case in point. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work and no amount of money thrown at it will change that and no amount of stonewalling will keep it out of the public eye forever. Meanwhile, 10 courts are being shut down in LA and 50 million people live in poverty in America. $3.1 billion is enough to give every person living in poverty, $62. That’s like robbing every poor person of $62 and giving it to some technology company whose CEO makes millions. Isn’t that welfare for the rich at the expense of the poor? A reverse Robin Hood program? Sounds very Republican.