Government blows $3 billion to digitize one immigration form

The federal government's project to digitize paper immigration forms was scheduled to conclude two years ago, but is now expected to finish in 2019, $2.5 billion over budget, according to a report by the Washington Post.

The Office of Transformation Coordination was given nearly half a billion dollars in 2005 to convert 95 immigration application documents into electronic, downloadable forms.

A decade later, officials charged with overseeing the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' Electronic Immigration System have just one digitized form to show for the $3.1 billion endeavor.

"Aside from the incompetence associated with the expensive failure to bring the management of the immigration process into the 21st century, this waste of taxpayers' money demonstrates that the federal bureaucracy cannot manage to effectively carry out our existing immigration policies in the public interest," Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told the Washington Examiner.

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