Bureaucratic Mismanagement? USDA Spent $2 Million an Intern

By Amanda Brodhagen, Farms.com

The USDA is in hot water over a funding project that went wrong. USDA officials had spent $2 million on an internship program and only had one participating intern. This issue occurred because the department failed to protect themselves from hackers, even after receiving $63 million in federal government towards boosting security measures.

This cover-up scandal was revealed after a USDA inspector report found that the Office of Chief Information Officer had “funded an intern program for a total of $2 million which, while funded as a security enhancement project, only resulted in one intern being hired full-time for ASOC [Agriculture Security Operations Center.”

This oversight sheds some light on USDA’s mismanagement of 16 projects that were supposed to protect the department from security threats. Back in 2009 the department requested an increase to the security budget from $18 million to $44 million. The stickler in the report is that even after an increase of $63.4 million in overall funding, the department received back in 2010 and 2011, however, the IT and security systems are still susceptible to risk. This sounds like a case of bureaucratic mismanagement at its best.