Shredding up 600 percent under Bush
Via Radar Online, here’s a revealing chart of U.S. government spending on paper-shredding over the past seven years: The chart comes from usaspending.gov, a very slick new Web site put together by the folks at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Interestingly, they hired one of their fiercest critics—OMB Watch—to help build ...
Via Radar Online, here's a revealing chart of U.S. government spending on paper-shredding over the past seven years:
Via Radar Online, here’s a revealing chart of U.S. government spending on paper-shredding over the past seven years:
The chart comes from usaspending.gov, a very slick new Web site put together by the folks at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Interestingly, they hired one of their fiercest critics—OMB Watch—to help build it. That must have taken guts, but the end product is a journalist’s dream. It’s fully searchable, sortable, and chock full of information that takes hours to pull together by other means.
Just something I noticed: The top contractor for “paper shredding services” is not some corporate behemoth, but rather a place called National Industries for the Severely Handicapped. NISH’s Web site suggests cites identity theft as the main reason one would want to shred documents, but I think the obvious explanation based on the chart is the Iraq war, which involves reams and reams of classified documents that must be destroyed.
Blake Hounshell is a former managing editor of Foreign Policy.
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