Should American taxpayers be relieved that the government finally killed the abominable three-year project or outraged that it existed in the first place? It’s not like money wasn’t wasted. In less than a year, the failed Pakistani Sesame Street project burned $6.7 million, according to a State Department spokesman quoted by the Arab-language news network.

So why did the feds nix the project? They received “credible allegations” of fraud and corruption at the Pakistan-based company (Rafi Peer Theater Workshop) Uncle Sam hired to produce a local version of the kids’ show. The feds immediately launched an investigation and fired off a letter terminating the agreement, according to the news report. Still, the Pakistani version of Sesame Street, known as “Sim Sim Hamara,” aired for nearly a year at U.S. taxpayer expense.  

Pakistan Sesame Street was part of a broader, U.S. program to improve education and increase tolerance worldwide. Americans have doled out millions to create Sesame Street in nearly two dozen countries, including Islamic nations such as Indonesia, Egypt and Bangladesh. The cash is distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a famously bloated entity that claims to advance the nation’s foreign policy goals by providing economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world.

The Indonesian Sesame Street (Jalan Sesama) came about as part of a six-year, $157 million initiative, promoted by President George W. Bush, to improve education in the southeastern Asian country. Under that plan, $8.5 million went to a New York-based company that developed and produced an “Indonesia-specific version” of the children’s program. Jalan Sesama actually “helps to strengthen school readiness for millions of children,” according to USAID, and strengthens early childhood education and development.

The Arabic Sesame Street series (Alam Simsim) broadcast in Egypt cost $8.4 million. The U.S. hired an Egyptian company called Karma Production to create that country’s version of the original series, which first aired in 1969. Egypt’s special version is set in a “typical Egyptian street” and reflects the country’s rich culture and tradition, modeling mutual respect and understanding,” according to USAID.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is blowing $10 million to train Filipinos to work in Asian call centers that serve the very U.S. businesses the president threatened to strip of tax deductions for moving jobs and profits abroad. In fact, in hisState of the Union address earlier this year, Obama said “it is time to stop rewarding businesses that ship job overseas.”

Ironically, his administration is contributing to the problem. A news magazine that covers information technology broke the story last week and it has ignited bipartisan outrage among federal lawmakers. So far two congressmen—one Democrat, one Republican—have demanded that the federally-funded call-center training program be immediately suspended. They cite a similar USAID project in Sri Lanka that was abandoned in 2010 at their behest.

This latest project is training 3,000 Philippine students to man the phones in areas ranging from healthcare to travel, for domestic call centers from Asia. It’s called Job Enabling English Proficiency (JEEP) and graduates get placed with outsourcing vendors that provide U.S. companies with profitable offshore perks, including Asia’s cheap labor costs. The U.S. program includes 400 hours of training over two years and 23,000 students are currently enrolled in the Philippines.

One of the congressmen demanding that the Philippine JEEP be nixed, New York Democrat Tim Bishop, notes that over 4.5 million Americans work in call centers but more than half a million jobs have been outsourced from the U.S. to foreign nations. “I support the international development mission of USAID but my top priority is protecting American jobs and American taxpayers,” Bishop said. “I anticipate working closely with USAID in a bipartisan manner to ensure that none of its programs overseas will hurt workers here at home.”

Bishop and North Carolina Republican Walter Jones co-authored a letter to Obama’s handpicked USAID Administrator, Rajiv Shah, calling for JEEP’s end. “We cannot support the use of federal taxpayer dollars for outsourcing training programs that conflict directly with the Administration’s stated policy of repatriating American jobs from overseas and we demand that this ill-advised project be discontinued immediately.”

Both have threatened to use every legislative option available to permanently prohibit USAID from engaging in such practices in the future. Actively funding the training of foreign workers for call center jobs outsourced by American companies is “extraordinarily distressing” given the fragile state of the recovering American labor force,” the congressmen write.

This increases their “vulnerability to many climate impacts,” according to a State Department assessment posted on a web site dedicated to releasing all sorts of interesting government documents. In this case the information is outlined in a Gender and Climate Change Fact Sheet complied by USAID, the government agency that provides economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide.

The fact sheet mostly focuses on women in developing countries such as Africa, Bangladesh, Mexico, Peru and Ecuador. “Development experts,” presumably working for the U.S. government agency found, for instance, that in Africa men have greater access to radios. This puts women at a disadvantage because they’re more likely to hear forecasts and early warnings when delivered through extension workers. This is deep stuff.

Here is another example of how global warming hurts poor women more than any other demographic; in many societies women have the primary responsibility for collecting water and firewood and climate change exacerbates resource scarcity, forcing women and girls to travel farther to collect the supplies. This increases threats to their safety and negatively impacts other areas such as farming productivity and child care.

Uncle Sam’s gender disparity assessment also found this; because women are already vulnerable to “under nutrition” and have less access to medical services, they will suffer more because “changing temperatures alter vectors for diseases like malaria, higher sea-surface temperatures are correlated with cholera epidemics and more frequent droughts and floods will worsen sanitation and hygiene.”

Among the recommendations to help remedy this crisis is to “involve women in vulnerability assessments” and “incorporate gender considerations into national climate change strategies and regulations.” The government fact sheet doesn’t elaborate on what exactly this means or, more importantly, how much this will cost U.S. taxpayers.

This is simply the latest of many government alerts on the ills of global warming since Barack Obama became president. In the last few years the administration has released alarming reports saying that global warming could lead to a worldwide increase in mental illness, cancer and even sexual dysfunction and that it will make food “dangerous.” This, of course, will add to the malnourishment of millions worldwide.

Just a few months ago the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation revealed that global warming is much worse than previously imagined because the ocean actually masks the true rate of damage for periods as long as a decade. Under this theory, the crisis is way more severe than what it appears because the sea is storing the heat that damages the earth, making it appear as if there is a sort of hiatus in climate change when there really isn’t.