Truly enormous sums of money are wasted by the federal government. Merely lessening the amount flushed down the toilet that is Washington, D.C., would help ease the nation’s deficit spending problem.

But there is a vast difference between how the government operates and how private businesses handle the mistakes that are made there. In the private sector, people are held accountable for sloppiness.

About $214 million has been spent on a sophisticated new security system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The system was supposed to have been in operation last summer.

But it doesn’t work. The government says it will take six months and $41 million more to make the system functional.

In the private sector, someone, perhaps several people, would have been fired. There is no word of such action in reaction to the expensive government fiasco.

And that is why waste is a way of life in Washington, D.C.