Hometown News

Whenever our home state of Maine makes the IP news circuit, attention must be paid. This time it is the revelation that the welfare consultant hired by the LePage administration, Gary Alexander, lifted much of his recently released report on Maine’s government assistance programs from a 2011 paper authored by policy experts from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for Law and Social Policy, both based in Washington, D.C.

Once held up to the light, additional scrutiny of the report revealed additional examples of plagiarism—including content lifted from a previous report that the Alexander Group performed for the state of Arkansas (with a find–and–replace done to ensure that “Maine” is substituted for “Arkansas”).

However serious you view the act of plagiarism, in Alexander’s case, it is not an academic debate about intellectual theft. Rather, Alexander was hired through a $925,000 no–bid contract, and has been paid at least in part with funds diverted from programs for needy families. The consequences are anything but abstract.