Fox News ran an article late last week concerning the State Department’s own Office of the Inspector General’s report concerning State’s handling of taxpayer funding of activities in support of the climate change meme—in other countries, yet.  The OIG audit itself can be read here, and the auditors’ list of State programs sampled can be seen here.

What the OIG found in State’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs and its Office of Global Change (OES/EGC), “the nerve center of the Obama administration’s international climate change policy,” was…interesting.  The findings, which included aggregate overspending of some $214 million over the period 2006-2010 that was the subject of the OIG audit, included these:

• 7 of 19 program totaling $34 million in grants had no particular plans for results monitoring.  Thus, as OIG wrote, “…[State] may not always have reasonable assurance that federal funds were spent in accordance with the grant award; that the grant recipient performed program activities as dictated in the grant award; and that the program’s indicators, goals and objectives were achieved.”
• [G]rant oversight officers failed to provide written reviews of compliance with State Department reporting standards….
• [V]isits to climate change sites were rare, and then little effort went into actual examination.  [R]eports “typically summarized meetings held with grantee officials where only the statuses of the programs were discussed.”
• Requirements that grant recipients submit quarterly financial statements seemed routinely to be ignored.  [A] recipient in Hyderabad, India, who got two separate grants totaling $1.1 million continued to receive funding, even though reporting requirements were not followed.
• Indeed, reporting requirements for detailed results were not included in any of the seven grants examined by OIG.

Regardless of what anyone might think of the idiocy of spending taxpayer money on the chimera of man-caused global warming, here is a potful of that money being shipped overseas for…well, just because, apparently, given the interest in oversight shown here.  At least, had that money been spent at home, there might have been one or two domestic jobs created or saved, instead of those jobs being outsourced.