CNN investigates $31 million "stimulus" project

This story may not be nearly as compelling as the James O'Keefe/Hannah Giles Acorn videos, but it may be a sign of things to come. CNN's Drew Griffin investigates why $31 million of stimulus money was allocated to two border crossing facilities that each handle an average of 22 vehicles per day. Griffin asks:

Did politics, rather than security, guide the DHS? Especially when a border town like Laredo, Texas, which sees 66,000 crossings a day, was getting not one dime of the $400 million in DHS border stimulus funds. Montana, in total, was to receive $77 million.

When questioned by CNN, the DHS initially defended the decision, but later changed its tune and suspended the plans until further review.

In business, there is a concept called Activity Based Accounting, where costs are assigned to a product or service based on the activities they require. In this case, the cost is the $31 million, and the activity is vehicles served. With twenty-two cars served per day per facility, times two facilities, these border patrol facilities will service about 16,000 vehicles per year. Assuming the facilities are good for 20 years, that means that the facilities can expect to serve approximately 320,000 vehicles over the course of their useful lives. Therefore, the cost of each vehicle served would be approximately $100/per vehicle. And, this does not include labor costs and other operating expenditures, which might easily add another $25-$50 in cost per vehicle served.

With a $700 billion stimulus bill, there are probably thousands of stories like this one. As Jon Stewart shouted to the mainstream media in his hilarious Acorn report, "Let's get to work people!"