All too often, when government employees — from politicians to bureaucrats — spend money, it’s clear from their behavior that they know they are spending OPM, or other people’s money.

The latest example of this mentality made the news this week after the administrator for the General Services Administration in Washington fired two top managers and then resigned after an internal investigation revealed details of the GSA spending $823,000 on a four-day conference in Las Vegas.

That cost is not even a drop in the bucket when it comes to trillions of dollars of debt facing taxpayers, but the GSA conference does suggest a cultural indifference when it comes to spending taxpayers’ money and a troubling business-as-usual attitude despite constant talk of tight budgets.

The latest outrage came over the GSA flying 300 government employees from the West Coast to Las Vegas for a conference in October 2010.

Before deciding on a location not far from the Vegas Strip, the GSA spent $130,000 for six scouting trips and meetings with event planners, according to the Washington Post.

Highlights of the charges triggering the usual statements of outrage in Congress and the White House include $44-a-person breakfasts and $6,325 for commemorative coins featuring the logo of the Obama administration’s stimulus program and presented in velvet boxes.

The Vegas event also featured a “team-building” exercise involving small groups of GSA employees working together to assemble a bicycle. That lesson in cooperation and coordination cost taxpayers $75,000.

At the end of the event, participants were presented with “yearbooks” featuring their photographs. That little thank-you gesture cost taxpayers $8,130.

The event’s tab for food and beverages was $146,527.

The GSA, headquartered in Washington, has 12,600 employees in 11 regional offices. It manages buildings and office space for the federal government and also supplies the buildings.

This scandal is similar to the 2011 story of a Justice Department conference that paid event planners $600,000 and featured $16 muffins and $10 cookies.

Further investigation found that the $16 was not just for a muffin, but included fruit, coffee and juice. A real bargain.

Once again, the money spent is an outrage, but the bigger problem is the obvious disregard when it comes to spending taxpayers’ money.

It’s worrisome to think that if these two lavish events were exposed at the GSA and the Justice Department, there must be others that have not yet been revealed. What are the costs for conferences for the departments of Homeland Security, Energy, Transportation, Labor, Defense and Education? What about the conference costs for the hundreds, or thousands, of other federal agencies, bureaus, authorities and commissions?

These scandals are evidence of what many people across America already believe — that it’s a different world inside the Washington Beltway. The complacency that comes with spending OPM is apparent in the GSA story and others where politicians and bureaucrats don’t seem to care how they spend money, taxpayers’ money.