GSA? Don't get us started!

The behavior of the General Services Administration bureaucrats who went wild in Las Vegas is jaw-dropping because of the crass, insulated arrogance of it all.

It took a disturbing group-think mindset for 300 GSA employees including senior leaders to blow $822,751 in taxpayer funds at a “conference” at a swank hotel outside Las Vegas in 2010.

There were clowns and magicians! There were free souvenirs, clothing and tuxedo rentals! There were two scouting trips, five planning meetings and a “dry run” for the conference, with six of these events occurring at the resort! There were parties in hotel rooms that were catered at taxpayer expense! And there were jokes about how no one can get fired at the GSA!

But thankfully that isn’t true.

The day an Inspector General’s report on the scandal came out, the agency’s administrator and two top officials were out of their jobs, and soon after 10 more employees were suspended, including one who asserted his Fifth Amendment rights when called to testify before a congressional committee.

What is perhaps the most disturbing part of the whole scandal is that this was apparently the culture within the GSA, an oversight agency that is the federal government’s landlord. In this case, there were violations of not only regulations, but federal procurement laws.

“As the agency Congress has entrusted with developing the rules followed by other agencies, GSA has a a special responsibility to set an example, and that did not occur here,” the Inspector General’s report states.

Taxpayers have to wonder, if this is how the GSA rolls, how do the thousands of employees in the hundreds of other bureaucracies behave? That is the shame of it, because there surely are federal employees who take their jobs seriously, and perform their duties responsibly and ethically. Yet in a way, they are harmed by scandals like this even more than the rest of us.

The Inspector General’s report makes it clear the GSA has tons of regulations that specifically ban many of the expenditures, so it’s not a matter of making more rules. It’s a matter of changing a culture of wasteful spending within a government that now has amassed a national debt of nearly $16 trillion.

And it’s important to note this conference happened in 2010, when the nation was in the depths of the great recession.

“Civil servants” in Washington, D.C., need a big dose of accountability, and a serious understanding of who works for whom in this country.