Back around 1990, a federal government economist whom we knew decided that he wanted to live overseas at taxpayer expense. He applied for and obtained a job at USAID, currently in the news as a target for Elon Musk’s Efficiency Nazis (TM). USAID paid our hero for about 6 months to attend a daily Spanish language class with a handful of other students. He was assigned no other work besides this half-day class. When he failed to develop the required proficiency in Spanish, unlike the other students in the class, USAID continued to pay him a full-time GS-15 salary and they also paid for a year of one-on-one Spanish tutoring. He thus spent approximately 18 months on the taxpayer dole with the sole goal of learning Spanish.
USAID then deployed him… to Egypt.
The punchline to this story is that when we would laugh about the absurdity of taxpayers bleeding 1.5 years of costs so that he could learn Spanish in prep for 3 years in Cairo, notoriously short on taco trucks, he was unable to understand what was funny. He responded that USAID had a foreign language proficiency requirement and it had to be met before anyone could be sent overseas and that there was no requirement that the language learn bear any relationship to the country of deployment. The whole episode made perfect sense to him even if it seemed to the rest of us to involve a lot of costs and no benefit to taxpayers.
From the Guardian:
From state-sponsored NPR:
I did contract work for USAID in many countries after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Everything I saw was an extraordinary waste of tax payer money – the funding of projects that were invariably poorly thought out and half baked – and this was well before the DEI stuff. The money might as well as have been thrown out the window for all the good it did. It was poor people in a rich country sending money to rich people in poor countries.