CDC Shinanigans

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), a practicing physician and ranking member of a Senate oversight committee, just released a report on out of control spending and waste at the Center For Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. The report questions the CDC's spending on things such as $200,000.00 for equipment at the employee fitness center that includes things like zero-gravity chairs and mood-enhancing light shows. The CDC has also spent $1.7 million dollars advising TV shows (such as ER and 24) on how to make their programs medically accurate.

Coburn's report on the CDC provided details on a massive construction project at the CDC's headquarters in Atlanta that has exceeded $1 billion (that's 1,000,000,000.00 dollars ... it looks so much bigger this way). The new buildings include a $106 million communications center with a 70 foot by 25 foot wall of plasma video screens for visitors. The Center is named after Sen Tom Harkin (D-IA) who surprisingly was the ranking member of the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing the CDC. The new $110 million headquarters building (with $9.8 million in new furniture) is named after Sen Arlen Spectre (R-PA) who is the former chairman of the Senate sub-committee shaping the CDC budget.

If you were to ask me, if they were going to spend all of that tax-payer money ... I would have preferred them to put it into R&D and maybe find a cure for something ... but that's just me ... maybe they really needed all that stuff.

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