Your Taxpayer Dollars Fund HSUS
The $640 toilet seat bought by the Pentagon. The $7,600 coffee pot. The $37 screws. The annals of government waste run long.
Add one more chapter: the Humane Society of the United States.
Federal records show that HSUS was awarded $715,000 last year from the federal government. Most of that money came from the Department of Justice, with another chunk of change coming from the Department of the Interior.
And what exactly is your money going towards? Some of it pays for shooting up feral horses with contraceptive drugs, while other money covers work HSUS should already be doing for free.
For the Department of the Interior, moneys to HSUS included $99,000 for “training on new penal code to improve enforcement of wildlife laws in Vietnam” and $65,000 for testing the contraceptive drug PZP on feral horses in northwest Arizona. HSUS wants the costly PZP to be used broadly to control wildlife populations, as an alternative to hunting–and taxpayers would foot the bill.
Ironically, Bureau of Land Management officials think PZP is a waste of time. According to a Government Accountability Office report released last month, “Due to the costs, limited duration of effectiveness, and the difficulty of accessing most areas, administering the treatments on a large scale is not currently cost-effective for maintaining most wild horse populations at sustainable levels, according to agency officials.” So why the outlay of public money to HSUS?
Funds from the Department of Justice, meanwhile, went to help pay for the care of dogs seized in criminal cases under the agency’s asset forfeiture program. The original contract value appears to have been reduced this year, but isn’t this something HSUS could do for free? HSUS has $50 million sitting in offshore Caribbean accounts, according to its latest tax return, and has enough money to pay 44 people over $100,000 a year in compensation. It spent $70 million on fundraising last year—couldn’t HSUS cut back on the junk mail solicitations to help care for some dogs? (Apparently not.)
Don’t want your tax dollars given to HSUS? Contact your Congressman and complain. A group hoarding $50 million in the Caribbean does not deserve a penny of taxpayer money. And since HSUS is on the public dole, perhaps an oversight committee can take a closer look at just how that money was spent.
