The junkets you fund

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How much of our hard-earned money has gone to subsidize the federal spring break-style trips and conferences over the last five years? Try $1,401,104,263. Bureaucracy boondoggle spending rose 70 percent in that period.

We wouldn't know anything about this binge if Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, hadn't asked. Last summer, the pork-busting chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information and International Security surveyed all federal departments and agencies and directed them to document their conference, meetings and travel expenses since 2000. At a Tuesday hearing, Mr. Coburn unveiled his findings.

You'll be happy to know the government junkets your tax dollars have funded include:

• A Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) trip to the resort town of Los Cabos, Mexico, for a conference on American real estate and urban areas.

• Another HUD outing to Honolulu -- for the Sacramento, Calif., Home Ownership Fair.

• A State Department expedition to Vienna, Austria, to partake in "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and "Train the Trainer" workshops.

• A Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) jaunt by 236 employees to an AIDS conference in Barcelona, Spain. Price tag: $3.6 million.

• A total of 59 HHS conferences around the world with delegations of more than 100 -- including more than 1,000 attendees to sunny Orlando, Fla. Employed by HHS? You're going to Disney World.

It would be one thing if all this worldwide travel were related to the actual agency/department goals and duties of federal employees packing their bags and riding off into the sunset. But in too many cases, there is little if any connection between the meetings and the mission.

Why are we paying for HUD employees to attend the New York State Governor's Dr. Martin Luther King Symposium? Or a conference held by the radical, left-wing, open-borders advocacy group, the National Council of La Raza?