US State Dept. Loses Anti-Terrorist Program Laptops

Stony Stevenson writes "It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program. Internal auditors found that the department lost track of $30 million worth of computer equipment, 'the vast majority of which... perhaps as much as 99 percent,' were laptops, according to one official. Another official calculated that the average State Department laptop costs US$3,000 and figured that meant as many as 1,000 laptops might be astray — not 10,000 laptops as the US$30 million figure suggests. They're obviously not very good at maths."

Comments

$3000 for a laptop??

[piojo]

A state department laptop costs an average of $3000? That's completely insane! No (non-gaming) laptop costs that much unless you're just trying to burn money. This further reduces my faith in the abilities of the national government (and makes me feel really great about my taxes). =/

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

[mazarin5]

I presume that price includes software, created by government contractors at high price for a specific purpose, divided amongst the few thousand computers that have it installed.

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

[Chris Mattern]

It's not like they have repurchase the same software for the replacement computers.

Haven't dealt with Microsoft lately, have we?

Broken Window Fallacy

[corsec67]

The parable of the broken window might be of interest to you as to why this is a bad idea.

You are saying "it is ok to steal from people if that money is going to be used to buy other things", right?