The government often is too quick to commit to spending money and too slow at nearly everything else.

Between the federal and state governments, hundreds of millions of dollars have been committed to plugging “orphan” wells — oil and gas wells abandoned decades ago by now-defunct companies, without the necessary remediation to prevent or mitigate environmental damage.

There are 350,000 such wells in Pennsylvania. Or perhaps there are more than 700,000 such wells in Pennsylvania. It will cost about $18,000 to plug each well. Or $33,000. Or $68,000. Or it might cost $110,000 each for some of the more difficult wells.

That, according to a Center Square article, is because Pennsylvania is proceeding with the efforts with incomplete data and with a lack of clarity about what federal prevailing wage requirements may do to the costs of the work.

We all should be confused how these appropriations could have been included in any budget that spends our tax dollars without these questions already being asked and answered.

We believe that the state 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, thorough 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 can understand that the government’s approach of quite literally spending money first and asking questions later only reinforces its constituents’ fears that lawmakers and authorities are poor stewards of our tax dollars.