You will be happy to see how Obama is spending your money

Here are some examples that hit the news in the last week:

Feds Wasted Millions in Utilities Program for Poor A government program that's supposed to help impoverished families heat and cool their homes wasted more than $100 million of taxpayer dollars paying the electric bills of thousands of applicants who were dead, in prison or living in million-dollar mansions. The Department of Health and Human Services spent $5 billion through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program in 2009, doling out money to states with little oversight. An investigation by the Government Accountability Office found about $116 million in improper payments to seven states in 2009. The program helped pay the electric bill of a Chicago woman who lives in a $2 million home and drives a Mercedes. The study found HHS paid $3.9 million to 11,000 applicants who used the identities of dead people...

Millions of Swine Flu Vaccine Doses Have Expired About a quarter of the swine flu vaccine produced for the U.S. public has expired -- meaning that a whopping 40 million doses worth about $260 million is being written off as trash. "It's a lot, by historical standards," said Jerry Weir, who oversees vaccine research and review for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The outdated vaccine, some of which expired Wednesday, will be incinerated. The amount, more than twice the usual leftovers, likely sets a record. And that's not even all of it. About 30 million more doses will expire later and may go unused, according to one government estimate. If all that vaccine expires, more than 43 percent of the supply for the U.S. public will have gone to waste...

FEMA Workers Ran Up $247,100 in 'Improper Purchases' on Government Credit Cards--Including $4,318 in 'Happy Birthday' Cards One employee used a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) credit card to buy $4,318 in “Happy Birthday” gift cards. Two other FEMA officials charged the cost of 360 golf umbrellas -- $9,000 -- to the taxpayers. Other FEMA officials used funds allocated for disaster relief in Oklahoma to buy 19 portable ceramic heaters for the office at a cost of $1,098. In all, $247,100 in “improper” expenses was made to FEMA credit cards, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General...

U.S. Has Paid $1.44 Million for Project That is Studying the 'Social Milieu' of Male Prostitutes in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has so far awarded $1.44 million in federal funds to a project that, among other things, is estimating the size of the population and examining the “social milieu” of male prostitutes in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam...

U.S. Spent $550,496 on Study That Did 'Focus Groups and In-Depth Interviews' To Learn About the Sex Lives of Truck Drivers The federal government has spent $550,496 on a project that involved conducting “focus groups and in-depth interviews” with American long-haul truck drivers to learn about their sex lives in order to assess their risk of contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted infections. The project has failed to find any instances of HIV among the truck drivers studied...

California welfare recipients withdrew $1.8 million at casino ATMs over eight months California welfare recipients using state-issued debit cards withdrew more than $1.8 million in taxpayer cash on casino floors between October 2009 and last month, state officials said Thursday. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an executive order requiring welfare recipients to promise they will use cash benefits only to "meet the basic subsistence needs" of their families. The order also gave the state Department of Social Services seven days to produce a plan to reduce other types of "waste, fraud and abuse" in the welfare program. The moves came after The Times reported Wednesday that officials at the department failed to notice for years that welfare recipients could use the state-issued cards to withdraw taxpayer cash at more than half of the tribal casinos and state-licensed poker rooms in California...