Seeker Blog

…At a recent Senate Commerce hearing, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn put this in perspective: “So we’re still going to pay $600, four times what the American [tax]payer should be paying, for something that can be done on a $150 BlackBerry.” He added: “A $400 iPhone can do twice as much as the $600 handheld. You could buy iPhones and do all of this.”

We would add that FedEx and UPS use handheld computers to track more than 22 million packages, all over the world, each and every day. Their computers work because their business depends on it. So you can know, up to the minute, when your Amazon shipment left Memphis, when it touched down in Parsippany and when it got loaded on the truck for delivery to your house. And yet the Census Bureau, with a decade to plan for it and hundreds of millions of dollars to spend, could not come up with a handheld computer to record the ages, races and addresses of those who don’t respond to the mailed census survey.

We wish we could be shocked by this fiasco. But no one who’s followed the IRS’s decades-long failure to upgrade a computer system built in the 1960s, or the Federal Aviation Administration’s reliance on vacuum tubes in the age of global positioning systems, can really pretend to be surprised.

At the Senate hearings last month, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was all apologies. But in the end, the Census will get the extra $3 billion it now “needs” to make up for a decade-long failure to perform. As happens all too often in Washington, failure will be “punished” with more money to fix what could have been done right the first, or even second, time.

Even Harris Corp., which was given the original $600 million contract for the Census computers, will now rake in at least $1.3 billion for providing one-third as many handhelds, which will do only one-half the work originally intended. Everyone seems to agree that Harris is not to blame, but we can’t imagine the company would prosper in the private sector with a similar result.

We keep hearing that the era of big government is back, and all of the presidential candidates are promising that Uncle Sam can and should do so much more for us. Here’s a radical idea: Before it takes on more obligations, maybe the government should first have to show that it is capable of doing in remotely competent fashion what the Constitution has obliged it to do for some 220 years.

Read and weep… Not mentioned were thousands of examples of equally shocking incompetence. E.g., after 25 years of flagrant waste the FBI’s computer systems are not up to the minimum standards required by a profitable used car dealer.