According to Al Kamen in the Washington Post article Speeches That Keep On Giving, dated February 6, 2009, the Department Of Homeland Security spent “$11,200 on a book of Secretary Chertoff’s ‘Select Speeches'” which it then distributed to hundreds of DHS employees.
Has DHS heard of this new-fangled thing called the World Wide Web on which those speeches could have been published at next to no cost to the taxpayer? Apparently not…maybe DHS needs to take a tip or two from Al Qaeda’s publicity department. A quick Google search indicates that many of those speeches are already available on the web.
$11,200 surely is peanuts to DHS but if this expenditure is any indication of how they manage their money then we as taxpayers are in trouble. And it is not peanuts to me. Oh, and since those speeches are presumably unclassified, they are most likely to be boring as hell.