the buzz log

How would you waste a million dollars?

Spending money on rude vices and cheap thrills, any civilian can do that. But to blow through millions on foreign prisons without walls or computers covered with bat dung requires a lack of planning on a magnificent scale.

Pasadena-based Parsons Constructions shows how it's not done, with the help of U.S. officials: A Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction report singled out the global conglomerate for projects that went nowhere, among them a prison, courthouse, and border control stations.

Parsons blamed unsafe conditions in wasting 42 cents out of every dollar it received (in this case, 333 million of those dollars). It shouldn't be so modest: Inspector General Bowen has given them due credit for what Bloomberg News called "sloppy construction and poor management."

Then again, money's easy to waste during a war. It takes imagination to misplace Caterpillar tractors and Jaws of Life rescue equipment. The Indian Health Service is missing equipment worth $16 million—and that was just a random check of 7 out of 163 field locations.

Not everything went missing, as the government report notes: One office dumped $700k worth of IT stuff when bats used the area for a pit stop. Maybe the IHS should consider turning that guano into gold and following one energy plant's model, and really turn millions into waste. And really, that ain't easy.