This Wall Street Journal editorial tells a story of government incompetence.

This time around, the Census Bureau wanted to do things differently, ditching paper for handheld computers that Census workers could use to collect and transmit data from those who don’t fill out the forms sent through the mail.It wasn’t to be. Despite two years of development and a $600 million budget, the Census Bureau and Commerce Department recently decided that the $600 handhelds weren’t up to the job…In the field, they proved to be slow and unreliable. The Bush Administration’s official explanation is that the Census Bureau didn’t get its requirements straight with the contractor, Florida-based Harris Corp. No doubt that’s true…Even so, we doubt that “slow and unreliable” were part of the original specs in March 2006.

The best part:

At a recent Senate Commerce hearing, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn put this in perspective: “So we’re still going to pay $600, four times what the American [tax]payer should be paying, for something that can be done on a $150 BlackBerry.” He added: “A $400 iPhone can do twice as much as the $600 handheld. You could buy iPhones and do all of this.”
We would add that FedEx and UPS use handheld computers to track more than 22 million packages, all over the world, each and every day.

After you read the editorial, you might think that we just wasted $1.3 billion to develop and acquire a useless, inferior alternative to cheaper existing technologies. But cheer up: just think of it as a “stimulus package,” like the one that’s sending me a $600 check sometime this week for doing absolutely nothing.