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RE >> "Costs for the search were approximately $80,000 in 1996 dollars." I have a question about this. But before I proceed, let me be clear: I am not question

RE >> "Costs for the search were approximately $80,000 in 1996 dollars." I have a question about this. But before I proceed, let me be clear: I am not questioning the expense - in my view, it's well spent. My question: when my local government nit-picks over the cost of a fixing a pot-hole on a main boulevard, how do costs like this get justified at the government level? Especially given the time frame: the vehicle had clearly been there a while and they had evidence that the Germans were there possibly as early as July and the search was October. Not to be grim, but the odds of a survival case were low. Not questioning the expense (well spent), but I'm curious to know more about how these sorts of expenses get justified and approved at the bureaucratic level? This is not a criticism, just a question.

tomcam 4y ago
It’s my impression that you’ve uncovered a tiny tiny tip of a very very large iceberg. One simple answer is that not fixing a pothole has almost zero political cost. However, not organizing a huge mediagenic search when tourists from a developed country might die could have a massive blowback. So I think they will just tweak the budget of something else later when everyone else has forgotten in order to pay for the search. But think about the police departments in places like Los Angeles, Seattle, Baltimore, and Chicago. They quietly pay settlements of tens of millions of dollars per year for police misconduct of all kinds. Somehow these costs are buried in opaque sections of the budget that no one is willing to disclose. It never appears as a line item. It would take multiple annual freedom of information act applications to start to get to the bottom of what’s happening there.