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The Department of Energy's decision last year to withdraw from FutureGen-the first "clean coal" plant in the U.S.-largely because costs had doubled and would escalate substantially, was rooted in faulty calculations, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report released last week. At the end of January 2008-just after the FutureGen Alliance announced it would locate the zero-emissions demonstration plant in Matoon, Ill.-the DOE pulled out of the $950 million project, saying costs had doubled to $1.8 billion. It announced instead that it would pour its 74% share into smaller clean coal demonstration projects. But in its report, "Clean Coal: DOE's Decision to Restructure FutureGen Should Be Based on a Comprehensive Analysis of Costs, Benefits, and Risks" (PDF), the GAO found that the "DOE compared two cost estimates for the original FutureGen that were not comparable because DOE's $950 million estimate was in constant 2004 dollars and the $1.8 billion estimate of DOE's industry partners was inflated through 2017." The project was inflated $500 million, the GAO estimated, and should have cost $1.3 billion.

As a group, federal contractors are quickly getting obese at taxpayers' expense. Uncle Sam spent "an astounding $532 billion last (fiscal) year, shattering the previous year's record of $465 billion" on contracts, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said yesterday. He called federal contracting "a black hole for taxpayer dollars" as he released the Government Accountability Office's latest "high-risk" report on Capitol Hill. This biennial update covers programs and policies that the agency says "are at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement or those in need of significant transformation."