US government spent at least $945M on advertising

Federal agencies spent at least $945 million on contracts for advertising services in fiscal year 2010, and that sum doesn't include all public communications expenditures in the agencies reviewed or even all of the executive branch, a congressional report out last week shows.
Congressional Research Service reported that the calculation was incomplete since the total sum may never be fully known.
"It is unclear how much the executive branch, let alone the federal government as a whole, spends on communications each year," the CRS report found.
Of that total that was calculable, more than $545 million was spent by the Defense Department, much of it on ads to attract recruits, CRS noted.
The study was done as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia reviews 11 federal agencies. The report was published on the Federation of American Scientists' website.
A call to the office of Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the subcommittee, was not immediately returned.
The report found that the agencies are also engaging in using new and social media to communicate -- the government hosts 1,504 federal government domains that carry thousands of websites on them.
In addition, a Government Accountability Office report of June 2011 found that 23 of 24 federal agencies surveyed had a presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and all 15 of the president's Cabinet agencies have at least one Twitter account.


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Coburn Releases 'Wastebook' Detailing More Than $6.5 Billion in 'Unnecessary' Spending

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn on Tuesday released his annual "Wastebook" highlighting what he's labeled some of the government's most wasteful spending items, including $113,000 for a video game preservation center and $765,000 to subsidize "pancakes for yuppies" in Washington. 

Coburn, a Republican who is known around Washington as "Dr. No" for his opposition to excess spending, said in a press release Tuesday that his "Wastebook 2011" details the "most egregious ways your taxpayer dollars were wasted" -- items he claims total more than $6.5 billion in "unnecessary" spending.

"Video games, robot dragons, Christmas trees, and magic museums. This is not a Christmas wish list, these are just some of the ways the federal government spent your tax dollars," Coburn said in a statement.

Among the items on Coburn's list include $10 million for a remake of "Sesame Street" for Pakistan and $764,825 to examine how college students use mobile devices for social networking.

The "Wastebook" also claims $550,000 was spent for a documentary about how rock music contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as $48,700 for a festival promoting Hawaii's chocolate industry.

"Instead of cutting wasteful spending, nearly $2.5 billion was added each day in 2011 to our national debt, which now exceeds $15 trillion," Coburn said.

Coburn noted that nearly $1 million went to projects in his own state, including nearly $400,000 for the state's agriculture department to study how different colors on shade cloths affect vegetable growth.
Read Coburn's Wastebook 2011 report.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/20/coburn-releases-wastebook-detailing-more-than-65-billion-in-unnecessary/#ixzz1h81txmn2