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The government often is too quick to commit to spending money and too slow at nearly everything else.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been committed to plugging "orphan" wells -- oil and gas wells abandoned decades ago by now-defunct companies.
There are 6,000 such wells in West Virginia, 20,000 in Ohio and 27,000 in Pennsylvania. It will cost about $18,000 to plug each well.
The problem, though, is that data on all such wells remains wildly incomplete. A report in The Center Square noted there are an additional 300,000 undocumented wells in Pennsylvania.
Still, at least $1.3 billion could be allocated to start the effort of capping these wells.
We all should be confounded how these appropriations could have been included without knowing exactly how many wells really are out there.
States should identify and plug the most troublesome of orphan wells. But we also believe that before the government began pledging such enormous sums of money to this endeavor, authorities should have studied the matter in a more comprehensive fashion to determine which wells should be a priority, how many such wells exist and how the cost per-well could be kept to the most prudent level.
We understand the government's approach of spending money first and asking questions later only reinforces its constituents' fears that lawmakers and authorities are poor stewards of our tax dollars. But surely we can do better than this.