From Capitol Hill Blue:

The U.S. General Accounting Office released findings Thursday that show the federal agency that oversees immigration applications has a massive backlog and is inadequately funded to meet existing, much less increased demand...

It remains unclear how the massive costs of implementation and monitoring will be paid for as the federal budget deficit promises to reach a record of more than half a trillion dollars in 2004.

In a Jan. 5 letter to the top members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, GAO reports that from fiscal 2001 through 2003, the agency's operating costs exceeded the fees collected from applicants by almost $460 million.

The GAO review of immigration application fees and processing was required by law under the Homeland Security Act of 2002.

The audit agency also reports that CIA has not met the goal, set in March 2002, of a 6-month processing time for immigration applications and that the agency has no system to track the status of individual applications as they move through the process...

But most important is the fact that despite a funding increase of $80 million annually starting in 2002, the number of pending applications had increased by 59 percent, or more than more than 2.3 million to around 6.2 million by Sept. 30, 2003, the end of the fiscal year...

Maybe we could hire some illegal aliens to do the work for us.