$3 to $5 Million Annual Junket for NIST Bureaucrats?

The National Institute for Standards and Technology is a bureaucracy that deals with technical standards. It rarely gets any publicity. A Florida Congresswoman is now giving it publicity, all bad.

It has a subdivision, the Manufacturing Extension Program. As with most Washington bureaucracies, no one in Congress has heard of it. Well, almost no one. It spends about $128 million a year. On what? No one knows. Well, almost no one.

It turns out that NIST MEP spends between $3 million to $5 million annually to have a fun-filled weekend. This year, this was in Orlando. Why? Training.

Training. In Orlando.

How about training in (say) Detroit? Anyone at a training meeting in Detroit is going to stay in the building and get trained. No one is going to go out on the streets.

The NIST is indignant at such criticism of its annual training program in Orlando.

Some nosy whistleblower gave the Congresswoman a heads-up.