This is almost impressive.
JDC Manufacturing, a company co-owned by Democratic U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan’s husband Charles “Chip” Hagan, lowered the total cost of a 2010 stimulus-funded energy project…
Yeah, let me interrupt this, really quickly: turns out that Kay Hagan is materially profiting from that trillion-dollar raid on the Treasury that the Democrats staged in 2009. Like you do. Or, more accurately, like cash-obsessed Democratic Senators do when the money is just sitting there, right out in the open.
…but kept all of the savings, sending none back to taxpayers who had funded the stimulus grant.
The company’s original application stated the total project would cost $438,627, and said JDC would contribute “leveraged funds” amounting to $187,983, or 43 percent of the total. As the project reached completion, however, JDC revised the total budget downward by $114,519 and applied all the savings to its share, keeping all the taxpayer funding.
The rather tragic thing in all of this is that there will be people who will be legitimately confused by all of this. They’ll go, But… it’s taxpayer money! The company was given it as a gift by the government! Why should they pay it back? The company earned it, fair and square, by having the foresight to be owned by the husband of a sitting US Senator! …OK, now I’m laying it on a little thick; but the point is that there are folks out there who instinctively think – largely because they have been carefully taught to think – that the regular rules somehow don’t count when it’s ‘public’ money. If you gave your Uncle Harry a hundred bucks so that he can get a new rotary drill, and it turns out that Uncle Harry got a good deal on the drill and didn’t actually need that money, it’s perfectly understandable that you might expect to get that hundred back. And when you didn’t get it*, it’s reasonable to you to be upset.
And you should be upset here. Senator Kay Hagan’s husband’s company shouldn’t have gotten the money in the first place, and this story demonstrates that they didn’t even need the money, either. And, contrary to the apparently universal belief of the Democratic party’s legislators and leadership cadre, the US Treasury is not a goram piggy bank. If you don’t need it, don’t take it.
God save the Republic from these people.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: Thom Tillis for Senate.
PPS: Oh, I’m almost certain that it’s all legal. One of the other perks for having your very own US Senator to smooth the path, no doubt.
*I know, I know: you probably shouldn’t lend family members money unless you’re already accepted in your heart that you may not get that money back.
Anybody who has ever worked for the gubmint is well aware of the end-of-fiscal-year scrambling that happens when there are unobligated funds remaining in the coffers. “Who needs a new computer!” people will ask. “We need to spend this money or else we have to send it back to the feds!”
No one ever stops to say, “Gee, maybe we don’t need this money and should send it back instead of spending it willy nilly.” Because gubmint drones — and God save me, I’m one of them — rarely think of the taxpayer. I do, but I’m not a member of the hive mind.
It sounds to me like Hagan’s foray into nepotistic money laundering didn’t take into account little things like basic accounting. You can’t just KEEP federal money. You have to spend it or it gets liquidated back to the coffers from whence it came.
I saw the same issues wile in the Navy. It’s not that they didn’t think of giving the money back, the problem was that next years budget would be cut by however much you didn’t spend. So saving the taxpayer cash came second place to having enough budget to repair the oxygen generator when it breaks down. Which by a miracle didn’t break down one year, hence the cash excess…