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Dear Mr. Berko:

Under the Carter presidency, Congress established the Department of Energy (DOE) with a stated goal to lessen our dependency on foreign oil. The DOE now has 28,000 full-time government employees, and I was one of them when it was formed in 1977. I worked at the DOE for 17 years until 1995, when I was hired by one of the DOE’s nearly 100,000 contract employees with a big bonus and triple the salary I was earning. During my 17 years at the DOE, I helped manage contract approvals, loan guarantees, grant programs and assisted in its budget requests to Congress.

Since 1977, the DOE has spent almost a trillion dollars and, in my opinion, it has done little to justify that expenditure over 33 years. Yet the company that hired me has made hundreds of millions of dollars in net income since I joined it in 1995, developing and managing ridiculous pork projects demanded by members of Congress that private industry could have done at less than half of DOE’s costs. This year’s budget of $29 billion is pure waste. The U.S. hasn’t lessened its dependence on foreign oil, while the price of oil has increased from $14 a barrel in 1977 when Congress ordered the formation of the DOE to over $140 a barrel a few years ago.

I doubt that any of your readers can name a single important DOE accomplishment that has benefited Americans or lowered consumption, costs or our oil dependency. In fact, I also doubt that any of your readers can explain to a friend just what it is that the DOE does. The DOE is a boondoggle abused by Congress to compensate political contributors and encourage political contributions.

Mr. Berko, a painless way to eliminate $400 billion from our budget during the next 10 years is to eliminate the Department of Energy and its cabinet position.

I’m now retired, living a wonderful, comfortable life in Arizona, thanks to the DOE and the company that hired me away to help secure billions from the public trough.

I’ve been reading your column for nearly 20 years and discovered that you are also in the Phoenix paper when I retired here last year. I have no questions. I felt it necessary to share my experiences with you, hoping you would share my experiences with your readers. I’m not a political person, and I have no ax to grind, but I could not have written this letter earlier because it would have jeopardized my job and my substantial retirement package. I believe that you and other Americans should be aware of the waste and inefficiency of the DOE. I’ve sent this letter to several large newspapers and all have declined to publish it. My congressman has a copy, which he acknowledged with a “thank you” form letter. You are welcome to edit this any way you see fit and change or improve my sentence structure. — D.S., Phoenix

Dear D.S.: Thank you for reading my column and taking the time to send me your well-written four-page letter. As you can see, I have made very few changes to your composition, but had to omit the numerous names and fascinating allegations you made (about people, money, projects, graft, earmarks, etc.) because I can’t confirm them. However, I don’t doubt your claims, because I believe most government agencies are soaked in a similar acid bath of chronic corruption. I did discuss your letter with a close acquaintance who has been in Congress for many, many years. He’s familiar with the DOE folks, but wouldn’t comment on those names or allegations. He’s “quasi-honest” and said of your numerous observations: “That’s the way the Mercedes-Benz in this country.”

And I will say that we have the worst darn crooked government in the entire world, but it’s the best darned crooked government in the entire world. This sounds like a cop-out, but get used to the idea, because corruption is a form of sexual nourishment for most members of Congress and one of the six sins that voters will never, ever fix.

Please address your financial questions to Malcolm Berko, P.O. Box 8303, Largo, Fla. 33775 or e-mail him at mjberko@yahoo.com. © 2010 Creators.Com