Let's pause for a moment and reflect upon some of the services provided by our various agencies of the federal government.

There are, of course, the multi-tiered activities of the Internal Revenue Service, which will be responsible for sleepless nights the next few days for millions of American taxpayers. And even after next Tuesday's income-tax-filing deadline, millions of honest people will be sweating bullets, wondering if they made enough sense of the IRS' mish-mash of rules and instructions to avoid an audit.

Then you have the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Homeland Security. On the one hand, Homeland Security requires just short of a strip search for citizens hoping to catch a commercial flight.

On the other hand, the FAA apparently does not put the jetliners transporting those degraded passengers through much scrutiny at all - even when FAA field inspectors tell their bosses the planes aren't fit to fly.

Now comes news - thanks to the Associated Press' diligent use of the Freedom of Information Act - that some federal agency employees believe having a government-issued credit card is a green light to spend for all kinds of goodies.

There are, for example, the U.S. Postal Service employees who used their government credit cards to purchase Internet dating services, and to finance a company picnic at a Florida steakhouse, at which government workers ate prime rib and crab, and slurped up $3,000 worth of liquor and wine.

Or how about the four workers at the U.S. Department of Defense, who found a reason to spend $45,000 of taxpayers' money at Brooks Brothers and other fine clothing stores. Auditors became a bit suspicious when $7,000 was charged to government credit cards the week before Christmas.

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Then there is the State Department employee who charged $360 worth of lingerie at a place called Seduction Boutique. According to the employee, the frilly stuff was needed for a jungle training exercise for drug enforcement neophytes in Ecuador.

You have to give that one an A-plus for inventiveness, but it appears that U.S. taxpayers are the ones being reamed by the credit-card habits of too many government employees.

There are tens of thousands of federal workers with government-issued credit cards - and not nearly enough of them are supervised properly when it comes to spending on things our government ought not to be spending on.

A review of the credit-card use of more than a dozen federal departments indicated about 41 percent of the $14 billion in credit-card purchases during the 2005-06 fiscal period were questionable, and most did not follow departmental or federal spending protocol.

In most cases, the card holder made the purchase without getting clearance from a supervisor, which may explain why Veterans Administration employees managed to spend nearly $27,000 on six visits to Las Vegas. Bosses like to live large, too.

We're poking fun at fiscally abusive bureaucrats, but there's really nothing funny about the cavalier manner in which so many public servants misuse public funds for their own amusement. Billions in taxes - the ones we all sweat bullets trying to pay our fair share of each April - too often seem to be getting funneled toward improving the lives of a small army of federal workers.

Spokesmen for federal agencies have convenient responses to questions about lavish spending practices, but someone really needs to explain the need for seductive lingerie on a training exercise in the jungles of Ecuador.

Government auditors are getting involved, and so should members of Congress. If U.S. citizens are going to continue to be dressed down before boarding planes that aren't properly inspected, federal workers should be forced to follow tougher rules for spending our tax dollars.

April 11, 2008