EDITORIAL: What's Ours Is Theirs
Times-Picayune (excerpt)

The U.S. Postal Service will say that next month's price hike for a first-class stamp has nothing to do with the $14,000 its employees spent on Internet dating services or the bacchanal at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Orlando with 81 people and a $3,000 alcohol bill.

The excessive and inappropriate use of the postal service's credit card may be unrelated to the extra penny postal customers will soon be paying to mail a letter, but that doesn't mean taxpayers have any less right to complain about government waste.

As a recent report from the Government Accountability Office makes clear, the postal service wasn't the only place where federal employees took advantage of government plastic. The GAO, which looked at spending over a 15-month period spanning 2005 and 2006, also found bizarre charges made by employees at the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Many of the expenditures were excessive and also served no legitimate government purpose:

An Agriculture Department diverting $642,000 to her live-in boyfriend?

Four Pentagon employees spending more than $45,000 at Brooks Brothers and other haberdasheries a week before Christmas?

A State Department employee buying $360 worth of women's lingerie at a place called Seduccion Boutique? And it's for a drug enforcement jungle training program in Ecuador?

The 57-page audit notes "breakdowns in internal controls over the use of purchase cards" and recommends that "continued vigilance over purchase card use is necessary."