Coburn criticizes DOJ for wasting money on golf and video games while country goes unprotected

Children and teenagers who participate in crime-prevention programs funded by the Department of Justice are learning interesting things. According to a report released Monday by Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn’s office*, millions of dollars in grant money doled out by the DOJ has gone toward teaching young people across the country the ins and outs of golf, appreciating fine art, and the proper use of binoculars.

Also, that Santa is a fascist. Yes, it’s true. A company granted $30,000 by the DOJ for film programs meant to deter something — violence? — once showed an audience of youngsters “Santa, the Fascist Years,” a film which “uncovers and explores Santa‘s flirtation with politics and greed.”

Watch: Clip of “Santa, the Fascist Years”

But that’s not all. DOJ dollars have also paid for “a carnival, skateboarding, dancing, fashion shows, and even a doughnut eating contest,” all in the name of crime prevention.

This has led Coburn’s office to break out some rather aggressive questions: Why? WHY? and HUH?

“Americans woke up to news of a car bomb in New York‘s Times Square and a national debt surpassing $13 trillion in May,” begins the report from Sen. Tom Coburn’s office. “At the same time, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) was preparing for a ―Fun Day celebration in Texas, a luau in Tennessee, and other parties and fun activities across the country.”

In a report titled “Party at the DOJ,” Coburn’s office revealed that the recipients of DOJ funds are having an inordinate amount of fun, and that though it may delight the kiddies, there’s “little evidence that these programs,” fun though they be, have done anything to advance the DOJ’s mission.

But lest skeptics charge Coburn with of possessing an anti-fun bias, the Government Accountability Office also concluded that such programs have been chronically mismanaged by the DOJ.

“The GAO‘s findings that DOJ could not demonstrate the cost or effectiveness of recreational activities funded by the Department‘s grants echoes other recent evaluations of these same programs by a number of different investigations and reviews, all concluding results are not being demonstrated, oversight is lacking, and funds may be being misused,” Coburn’s report reads.

In 2009, the GAO concluded that while the DOJ had been collecting the data necessary to review programs conducted by the Office of Justice Programs, it had a poor record of sharing that information with legislators. “While [the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention] has developed performance measures for its grant programs and collects performance measurement data from its grantees, the office is making limited use of these data because it is not verifying these data to ensure their quality, which is inconsistent with leading management practices in performance measurement.”

The GAO letter goes on to cite OJP officials who say “they have not taken action to verify performance data because since 2002 they have focused on the collection of such data rather than on its utilization.”