West Virginia's Charleston Gazette has been hopping mad this week as one of its reporters learned that the state has been sticking 1,064 high-end $22,600 routers into “little public institutions as small as rural libraries with just one computer terminal.” When reporter Eric Eyre actually called up Cisco posing as a customer, he was told by a rep that the company's 3945 series routers were "our router solution for campus and large enterprises, so this is overkill for your network." Instead, the rep recommended a far cheaper commercial grade router for $500.

And while the 3945 series routers might be massively overkill for many of the locations to which they have been deployed, 366 of them aren't even being used. Instead, they're sitting in a warehouse.

A "bizarre operation"

The money for the routers came from federal stimulus funds designed to boost broadband access by better equipping public facilities like schools and libraries, especially in more rural areas. West Virginia officials decided not to vary the size of the routers they purchased based on the needs of the target facility. "A student in a school of 200 students should have the same opportunity as a student in a school with 2,000 students," one official told the paper.

In a series of articles this week, the Charleston Gazette has highlighted the scramble to spend the stimulus money back in 2010. Bids for the work went out quickly. By the time someone in the state Office of Technology wrote in an e-mail that “this equipment may be grossly oversized for several of the facilities in which it is currently slated to be installed," it was too late. The $24 million contract for the routers went to Verizon Network Integration, which had the lowest bid.

"At the end of the day, I suspect we've made some mistakes," State Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette said this week. "I'm reading stuff in your stories and learning stuff in the process."

The state recently hired consultants to advise it on how best to spend its broadband money; Burdette admitted that this should have been done before a big chunk of the cash was spent.

These revelations led the Gazette to write an op-ed on the subject this week in which it attacked the “bizarre operation.” The state official directly responsible for spending the money said it was important to buy devices that would not soon become obsolete. "We would feel better if federal inspectors examined the West Virginia project to verify whether he's correct," the paper concluded.

But it was on sale!

The revelations are sadly typical when money simply gets thrown at tech projects without enough planning and accountability. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), tasked with US airport security, came under Congressional scrutiny for the same sins this week. They simply bought too much tech and kept it in warehouses. A new report (PDF) from the House Oversight Committee yesterday claimed that "TSA is wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars by inefficiently deploying screening equipment and technology to commercial airports."

Here's how:

As of February 15, 2012, TSA stored approximately 5,700 pieces of security equipment in warehouses at TSA’s Transportation Logistics Center (TLC) in Dallas, Texas.

As of February 15, 2012, the total value of TSA’s equipment in storage was, according to TSA officials, estimated at $184 million. However, when questioned by Committee staff, TSA’s warehouse staff and procurement officials were unable to provide the total value of equipment in storage.

TSA’s annual costs for leasing and managing the TLC are more than $3.5 million.

Committee staff discovered that 85 percent of the approximately 5,700 major transportation security equipment currently warehoused at the TLC had been stored for longer than six months; 35 percent of the equipment had been stored for more than one year. One piece of equipment had been in storage more than six years—60 percent of its useful life.

As of February 2012, Committee staff discovered that TSA had 472 Advanced Technology 2 (AT2) carry-on baggage screening machines at the TLC and that more than 99 percent have remained in storage for more than nine months; 34 percent of AT2s have been stored for longer than one year.

As of February 15, 2012, TSA possessed 1,462 ETDs [Explosive Trace Detectors] in storage in its TLC warehouses. At approximately $30,000 per ETD, TSA’s purchases equate to nearly $44 million dollars in excessive quantities of ETD machines.

492 of the ETDs had been in storage for longer than one year. When questioned, TSA officials were incapable of providing the deployment plan.

TSA willfully delayed Congressional oversight of the agency’s Transportation Logistics Center twice in a failed attempt to hide the disposal of approximately 1,300 pieces of screening equipment from its warehouses in Dallas, Texas, prior to the arrival of Congressional staff.

And why was all this excess equipment purchased with no good plan to use it? Because it was such a good deal! As TSA managers told the investigators, "We purchased more than we needed in order to get a discount."