The Patriot Post® · $123M Annually for HHS Email

The Department of Health and Human Services has spent hundreds of millions on Healthcare.gov and still hasn’t managed to fix all the kinks. Yet a comparable amount has apparently been spent over the years on employee email services alone. According to a Government Accountability Office report, “HHS pays $146.64 per month per user for email.” HHS has an estimated 70,000 workers. “Assuming each employee has a government email address,” writes The Washington Free Beacon, “the agency pays $10,264,800 per month for its email services. The cost per year runs to $123,177,600.” And that doesn’t even include the $10.44 allocated each month per telephone line. The department hasn’t disclosed how many lines it operates, but every “phone call, whether local or long distance, is charged at a unit cost of $0.014 per minute,” adds the GAO.