How Many More Programs Are Like This?

This is almost too much to believe — certainly too much to want to believe:

The Department of Energy program to compensate sick nuclear weapons plant workers has cost $74 million of taxpayers' funds - and only one worker has been paid.

That one person in Washington state has received $15,000.

The $74 million has gone to paperwork involved in deciding whether workers were sickened by radiation or toxic chemicals on the job. ...

The DOE and its contractors are obliged to track down scarce documents, some decades old, on individual workers' exposure to deadly materials used in bomb-making. A panel of physicians makes the final decision on whether an illness or death was job-related.

Of 23,000 applications in nearly four years, DOE has rejected about 5 percent and moved ahead on 1 percent, according to testimony Tuesday from the General Accounting Office.

The kicker is that the DOE is asking for another $76 million dollars. That would be a nice round total of $150 million. Consider that the agency could give all 23,000 applicants $15,000 for $345 million, and it would seem that a less stringent process might be in order. Almost 5,000 people could have been paid $15,000 from the sum already spent, while the 6% of cases that the money managed to review only amounts to 1,380 folks.

Not knowing the background, I'm not going to comment on the merits of the program, but when dollar amounts in the millions are spent considering whether to hand out dollar amounts in the thousands, something's wrong. As John Hawkins suggests at the above link, perhaps the media ought to pay a little less attention to Big Energy and a little bit more to Big Government.