July 25, 2001

Jail time may help get DOE on level

It appears the U.S. Department of Education may be running the world's biggest school for malfeasance. There is no doubt that at the least, DOE officials for many years have permitted financial mismanagement that would be cause for dismissal at most businesses.

The plain, undisputed fact is that during the last three years of the Clinton administration, the DOE lost track of $450 million because of waste, fraud and sloppiness. Fairness dictates Clinton and his appointees not bear all the blame, however. Financial mismanagement at the DOE is a non-partisan problem that has gone on for decades.

New Education Secretary Rod Paige has vowed to continue a cleanup begun by his predecessor. We hope Paige's commitment is more solid than those we've heard in the past which, like so much in federal government, were followed only by new evidence of mismanagement and outright crime.

Paige says his department already has addressed nearly half of the 661 recommendations for reform made by the General Accounting Office and outside auditors. Those suggestions included tighter control over spending, more restrictions on it by individual DOE employees, and investigations into workers who may have committed crimes.

That's a start. It should be followed up by prosecution of each and every DOE employee found to have been involved in theft -- there's no better word for it -- from taxpayers. We suspect a few vigorous prosecutions, followed by stiff prison sentences, would do a world of good for the DOE's ability to account for the nearly $50 billion a year it spends.