Is your car out of gas? If so, drive on over to the most expensive gas station ever paid for by the American people. You know, the one in the picture at the top of this page.
Oh wait, you can’t. Not only does the above gas station just sell compressed natural gas (CNG), but it’s also located in Afghanistan, a country where no one owns a car that runs on natural gas or possesses the money to buy one. Worse yet, it cost $43 million to construct the abandoned station in the first place.
Reader, prepare yourself for 300 words of straight cringing.
The now disbanded Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO) was in charge of rebuilding Afghanistan and promoting the natural gas industry in the region. To complete its mission, the Pentagon have it a hefty budget of $800 million of American taxpayer money. Though it was only supposed to cost $500,000 to build that single gas station, the TFBSO managed to eat up $43 million of its budget on a single construction project.
In a letter addressed to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, federal watchdog group Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) expressed its outrage in this flagrant misuse of funding.
“Although TFBSO achieved its immediate objective of building the CNG filling station, it apparently did so at an exorbitant cost to U.S. taxpayers,” SIGAR leaders wrote. “In comparison, SIGAR found that a CNG station in Pakistan costs no more than $500,000 to construct. Furthermore, there is no indication that TFBSO considered the feasibility of achieving the station’s broader objectives or considered any of the potentially considerable obstacles to the project’s success before beginning construction.”
SIGAR’s letter elaborates on the shock and confusion felt throughout the organization when it discovered that the Pentagon no longer possesses any records of how TFBSO spent its enormous budget. Millions were spent on a single gas station, and no one knows how.
“Frankly,” the letter said, “I find it both shocking and incredible that DOD asserts that it no longer has any knowledge about TFBSO, an $800 million program that reported directly to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and only shut down a little over six months ago.”
What takes the cake is the fact that the station is useless. SIGAR found that there is no way to bring compressed natural gas to the gas station, and the chances of a car that takes that form of gas coming across the station in the Afghanistan desert are slim to none.
Why does this dusty desert gas station exist? Where did all the money go?