Would You Buy a Used Car from this Government?

Ever had an old car parked around the house?  One you didn't drive?  Ever figure how much money you could save -- insurance, upkeep, and such -- if you just sold the thing?
 
Uncle Sam has lots of cars like that.  Take the 36,000 cars at the Department of the Interior.  The Inspector General over there figures if they only used the cars they needed, Washington could save us taxpayers $34 million dollars a year.
 
That's the bottom line in a General Accounting Office report.
 
It costs Washington $1.7 billion dollars a year to operate the federal motor pool of more than 387,000 vehicles. 
 
The report mentions one car in particular.  The VA bought it with your tax dollars four years ago.  Ever since then, it's been parked behind a VA laundry.  Never driven.  No one in Washington can even find its keys now.
 
The Navy actually has ways of measuring how many cars a base needs.  They just don't always follow their own rules.  They found out if a single base had gone by it's own guidelines, it would have saved taxpayers $3.7 million.
 
And the Army found some cars had slipped by their guidelines for fleet size.  They had 99 too many at a single military base.
 
Federal agencies do try.  Here's a couple of examples in the GAO report:  

* A Navy command decreased its fleet from 156 to 105 vehicles over the course of a year, resulting in savings of about $12,000 per month. A Navy official explained that the decrease in vehicles was driven by cuts in the command's budget. 
 
* A Veterans Affairs medical center, in an effort to find potential savings, reduced its fleet by 12 vehicles, with estimated savings of about $57,000 per year.

But there's no standard method of deciding which cars are needed and which ones aren't.  So some agencies may be getting rid of too many cars, while others keep unused ones parked behind the laundry.
 
Trimming cars like that, would buy enough gasoline -- even at $2.00 a gallon -- to let you drive a big, gas-guzzling SUV from the earth to the moon, three and a half times.
 
Now, you or I might have some sentimental reason for keeping an old car.  Maybe it was the first one we ever owned, or the one we courted our first love in.
 
It's hard to get sentimental over Uncle Sam's car collection.  Maybe there are some memories for him in the back seats.  Afterall, we taxpayers feel like we've been there.