US government agencies are allocated more than $1 trillion of taxpayers' money annually – but not all of that cash is spent wisely or on projects that get completed. From Donald Trump's border wall to the doomed dam, read on to discover the most notorious unfinished projects the federal government wasted money on.

Mired in controversy from the get-go, this ill-conceived dam project on the American River near Auburn, California, has swallowed up hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers' cash since it was first proposed back in the 1950s.

After construction began in 1968, a seismic fault was discovered beneath the site. The proposed dam was unable to withstand a major earthquake and work was halted. Even though a redesign was submitted in 1980, work never resumed due to rising costs, public concerns over safety and environmental issues.

Various studies have assessed options for the project over the last 40 years, but no one plan has been able to revivie the project. A total of $315 million was wasted in project expenditures since the dam was first authorized by Congress in 1965, according to a US Bureau of Reclamation report from 2007. That's around $480 million today.

 

Over the past decade alone, the US military has wasted tens of billions of dollars on canceled projects at home and abroad. From 2004 to 2012, the US Air Force embarked on a fancy IT project to streamline its logistics. But problems started almost immediately...

Contract disputes meant that actual work didn't start until 2007, and just three years later there were doubts about completing the software system, which led to the first of three project "resets." It's estimated that more than 1,000 people worked on the project at one point. 

Finally seeing sense, the Air Force scrapped the unfinished IT project in 2012, having spent $1.03 billion ($1.4bn today) trying to get it off the ground. Intended to streamline logistics, the incomplete system had no "usable capability" according to the Department of Defense. And had the department tried to salvage the project, it would have cost another $1 billion and only delivered 25% of the system initially envisioned by the Air Force.

Even before Donald Trump's US-Mexico border wall, presidents were looking for ways to increase border security, such as President George W Bush's "virtual wall." The Secure Border Initiative (also known as SBInet) was a Department of Homeland Security plan to create a network of surveillance towers spanning the nation's borders.

Plagued with problems, the initial stage of the project went massively over budget and was beset with serious technical issues. The towers' radar sensors couldn't even differentiate between people and falling leaves. Unsurprisingly, the virtual wall was not in operation by 2011, as originally scheduled.

The project had an estimated cost of at least $7 billion to cover the entire 2,000-mile border. By the time the Obama administration pulled the plug on the whole debacle in 2011, the Department of Homeland Security had wasted $1 billion ($1.4 billion with inflation) on the faulty system for a stretch of just 53 miles along the border in Arizona. 

The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been trying to modernize its electronic health records (EHR) system for over a decade. Recent attempts were developed from 2011 to 2016 at a cost of $1.1 billion ($1.45 billion today). One by one, the projects were canceled. In 2018, a government audit revealed the VA had blown nearly $2 billion ($2.5 billion today) on a series of EHR upgrades that all failed spectacularly.

However, that number pales in comparison to the latest waste of taxpayers' money. In May 2018 the department signed a $10 billion, 10-year deal with Cerner (now Oracle Health) to upgrade the EHR system. Since the deal was signed, the budget for the project has increased to $16 billion and there have been hundreds of "major performance incidents" at the five VA medical centers already using the system.

Outages and other issues that jeopardize the safety of patients have stalled the rollout of the new system. A survey of VA staff revealed that fewer than 1 in 5 doctors, nurses and other health employees say the system enables them to deliver “high-quality care.” As of 2024, the VA is renegotiating its contract with Oracle due to poor performance. 

One of the most ambitious US megaprojects ever, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas would have been America's very own particle collider, rivalling the famous particle collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. 

If it had been built, the SSC may well have beaten CERN to discover the Higgs boson "God particle." First proposed in 1976, President Reagan approved the project in 1987 with an original budget of $4.4 billion, around $12 billion with inflation. By the early 1990s, however, costs were spiraling out of control. 

Congress was divided, with the House of Representatives voting to cancel the project and the Senate willing to move forward (albeit with cost-cutting measures that ultimately caused delays, ironically racking up additional costs). Needless to say, the shockingly over-budget SSC was canceled in 1993, by which point total costs had ballooned to $11 billion ($24 billion today). By this time, access shafts and miles of tunnels had been bored, which now sit empty. Around $1.6 billion had been invested in the project by the end of the 1993 fiscal year. That's $3.5 billion in today's dollars.

NASA appears to be almost as free and easy with taxpayers' money as the US military. The space agency has pumped tens of billions of dollars into failed manned spaceflight programs in recent years, the most wasteful of which has been the Constellation Program.

The program was launched in 2005 under a directive from President George W. Bush, with the ultimate goal of returning US astronauts to the moon by 2020. NASA was allocated a bumper budget to develop a new spacecraft, the Orion, and several Ares rockets, and didn't waste any time spending the money...

In 2009, the Obama Administration deemed the project “over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation,” and shut it down after a jaw-dropping $9 billion had been spent, which is $12.2 billion today. That said, NASA has used the Orion spacecraft design for its current Space Launch System.

A boundary between the US and Mexico has existed since 1853. While various administrations had already installed 654 miles of fences and barriers to separate the nations, the controversial issue really came into the spotlight following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Trump promised to build a wall that would stretch the entire 2,000-mile length of the border during his time in office.

The wall was a prominent part of the 45th president’s manifesto, and an expensive one at that. Donald Trump said the project would cost about $8 billion and insisted that Mexico would be the one to foot the bill. The project not only went completely over budget, but the $15 billion eventually allocated to construction was financed by funds taken from counter-drug budgets and military construction funding. Mexico did not contribute a single dollar to the work.

By the time President Trump left office in January 2021, he had installed 452 miles of wall, but only 47 miles of that stretch were built from scratch – the rest was reconstruction of previously existing barriers. President Joe Biden did not continue the project when he took office.

When accepting the Republican nomination in July 2024 to run for president, Trump (who will take office again in January) said he'd complete the wall project he started. No further details have been revealed, but in 2020 it was estimated each mile of Trump's wall cost $20 million to build per mile.

Yucca Mountain in Nevada was chosen to be America's principal nuclear waste repository in 1987. The megaproject was approved by Congress in 2002, and work began on the complex not long after.

The project met with intense opposition and a number of problems arose, from the unsuitable geology of the site to concerns about transporting waste. When it was confirmed that nuclear power stations could safely store waste on-site for decades, politicians began to wonder if the project was even necessary.

President Obama pulled federal funding Yucca Mountain in the 2011 budget and effectively canned the project. By then, around $15 billion had been invested, which is around $21 billion in today's dollars. While the Trump Administration allocated money to attempt to revive the project in 2017, the president later announced while campaigning in Nevada in 2020 that he would not pursue it. 

In 2003, the US Army launched Future Combat Systems (FCS) to great fanfare. The most extensive military modernization program since World War II (if not ever), FCS would have created a fleet of lightweight robotic ground vehicles controlled by tech-savvy combat brigades.

A great idea on paper, in reality the vehicles were vulnerable to explosive devices and just weren't suited to modern guerilla-style warfare. By 2008, the program had lost the support of the army and the government, which was turning its focus away from conventional warfare to counterterrorism.

FCS was canceled the following year. An eye-watering $18.1 billion had already been spent, and cancellation fees paid to the contractor Boeing pushed the final bill up to $19.9 billion, nearly $30 billion today. It wasn't a complete waste of money, though, as several part of the program were successfully repurposed.

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