It was a project that yielded less than stellar results according to Sen. Tom Coburn’s Waste Book.
Teaching Moroccans how to make pottery.
Yes, this isn’t fake news, it actually happened and The federal government spent $27 million to do it.
So why should you care?
Because the Democrats and the left keep saying that what President Trump is asking for border security and the wall is a waste of money.
Yet they were happy to spend $27 million on pottery classes for people in another country.
Think about that.
They spent $27 million and it was a complete waste of time and money. According to Coburn’s book a lot of students showed up just to get the free lunches, and one pottery class reported just 10 regular students.
Oh it gets better.
The pottery program began in 2009 as part of an attempt to “improve the economic competitiveness of Morocco.”Coburn said.
A review by the Inspector General for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which oversaw the program, found that the project was “not on track to achieve its goals.
“A key part of the project involved training Moroccans to create and design pottery to sell in domestic and international markets,” the 2012 “Waste Book” explains.
“To accomplish this, an American pottery instructor was contracted to provide several weeks of training classes to local artists to improve their methods and teach them how to successfully make pottery that could be brought to market.“Unfortunately, the translator hired for the sessions was not fluent in English and was unable to transmit large portions of the lectures to the participants,” it said.
The instructor also “frequently forgot to bring the right materials to class,” and the dyes and clays he did use were not sold in Morocco – “making it impossible for the trainees to replicate the methods they had learned.”
The IG report that was released in December of 2011, concluded the “pottery training was ineffective, and women and youth were not included.” Ultimately, women accounted for just 25 percent of trainees.
“Moroccans have been making pottery since at least the fifth century B.C., with the earliest urban pottery made after 800 A.D.,” Coburn noted. “Perhaps USAID could learn a thing or two about pottery making from Moroccans, who have been passing knowledge of the ancient craft from one generation to another for centuries.”
The 2012 Waste Book by Coburn aims to shine a light on unnecessary federal spending.
Coburn documents 100 examples, resulting in a total of $18-billion wasted dollars.
“As you look at these examples,” Coburn writes to the taxpayer, “put your personal political persuasion aside and ask yourself: Would you agree with Washington that these represent national priorities, or would you conclude these reflect the out-of-touch and out-of-control spending threatening to bankrupt our nation’s future?”
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