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This is not, sadly, a joke. The last thing a free citizenry should pay any attention to is the advice from "expert" panels, commissions, charter committeees, blue ribbon panels, etc. foisted on them by Washington DC. They are especially suspect when member of the commission have served before, because prior service proves their "reliability," sort of like voir dire to try to find out if anyone on a jury knows anything about nullification.

The guys and gals are either really old, long since retired or early mid career working their way up through the committee later. Reliable service on committees helps research grants and favors to flow.

They serve on comittee after committee after committee. They sit through days and days and days of endless boring briefs by other "experts" who try not to tell them anything and the job of the panel is to make sure that they don't hear anything that they were not supposed to.

Then the committee takes the facts that were presented, and find the facts (those same facts, since the committee are all chosen for their reliablility) and then they will recomment that the government continue to study the options that the government said it was studying anyway, perhaps with the assistance of another paid committee.

The reward for all of this is pay(on some occasions), travel and second rate hotels, cheap wine and fattening hors d'oevres, and really really boring companionship of other boring committte members.

Then you spend weeks writing a thick report that no one will read that sits on the shelves of bureacracies and eventually the national archives, collecting dust. But occasionally someone will come along dumb enough to ask a question that the commission has reviewed (for the seventh time in the last 22 years) and the really idiotic quesitoner will leave with a box full of such commission reports to wade through before he/she can come back and ask another question.

The corruption is not the expense of these commissions (no one gets rich serving on them). It is that these are an excuse for heads of government never to make a decision on a major issue affecting the citizenry of the united states. The cost is the fact that the government spends a trillion a month doing nothing because it cannot decide what to do if anything other than continue to waste the taxpayers money.