Amazingly, there was little fanfare for a report by the GAO on Tuesday. The MSM was focused on the important issues of the day – what would Charlie Sheen do next, who got eliminated from American Idol, and the fashion mistakes at the Oscars. The GAO is about the only honest organization in Washington DC. It was formerly headed up by David Walker and it tirelessly tries to reveal the fraud, waste and corruption that our Congress promotes on a daily basis. A report that proves the stupidity, corruption and pure self interest of our elected officials is swept under the rug in hours. The captured MSM doesn’t even mention the report. Cutting waste and spending would reduce the power of Washington DC, therefore it will never happen. None of the programs listed will be eliminated. NONE.
The Federal Budget could be sliced by $250 billion in minutes by eliminating duplicate programs. Don’t hold your breath. I’m sure a new program to help the homeless just got created.
GAO’s simulations show continually increasing levels of debt that are unsustainable over time absent changes in current fiscal policies. The objectives of this report are to (1) identify federal programs or functional areas where unnecessary duplication, overlap, or fragmentation exists, the actions needed to address such conditions, and the potential financial and other benefits of doing so; and (2) highlight other opportunities for potential cost savings or enhanced revenues
Overlap costing billions
CONGRESSIONAL investigators at the Government Accountability Office have come out with another of those reports documenting the size and waste of the federal government.
And the numbers are stunning:
- 82 separate programs across 10 federal agencies to improve the quality of teachers.
- 15 different agencies over seeing food safety. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the seafood industry but catfish is the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture.
- 80 programs to provide transportation to the elderly and disadvantaged.
- 8 programs spending $62.5 billion on food and nutrition programs.
- More than 20 programs to help the homeless.
- Four federal agencies oversee a combined 52 programs to encourage entrepreneurship, 25 infrastructure programs and 26 for telecommunications.
THE GAO concluded the obvious, “Reducing or eliminating duplication, overlap, or fragmentation could potentially save billions of taxpayer dollars and help agencies provide more efficient and effective services.”
The report cited several specific savings — streamlining the Pentagon’s health-care bureaucracy could save up to $460 million a year, for example — but it declined to estimate the total amount of potential savings.
However, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who pushed for the study, put the savings at between $100 billion and $200 billion.
Some of these programs might be truly useful but they haven’t been evaluated for effectiveness in years.
GAO’s findings will provide rhetorical ammunition for the budget-cutting to come but if the fate of this report is like that of past reports that documented the same waste and duplication the debate may be thoroughly misleading.
CONGRESS likes to act as if the federal bureaucracy with its labyrinth of programs just appeared one day at the foot of Capitol Hill.
But the fact is that every single one of these programs is a creature of Congress.
The lawmakers must think that these programs have value because they approve their funding annually.
Federal programs tend to have powerful congressional patrons and the budget cutters and efficient government types mess with these fiefdoms at their own peril.
— Scripps Howard News Service
Administrator says:
Posted By Conn Carroll On March 2, 2011
Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a 345-page report detailing 34 major areas of wasteful government spending that Sen. Tom Coburn (R–OK) says could save the federal government $100 billion or more every year. Conservatives jumped on the news, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R–VA) office characterizing the report as “a mother lode of government waste and duplication that should keep Congress busy for the rest of the year.”
Liberals, however, greeted the report with polite applause bur then predicted nothing would come of it. Why is the left so uninterested in eliminating wasteful government spending? Why can’t progressive politicians agree to cut programs that even the GAO identifies as duplicative or ineffective? The answer can be found in the left’s reaction to two reports issued in the last weeks, one by bailed-out Goldman Sachs and the other by failed stimulus architect Mark Zandi.
On February 23, Goldman Sachs released a report purporting to show that the $61 billion in cuts in the House fiscal year 2011 spending bill would reduce economic spending by up to 2 percent this year. Not to be out done, Zandi released a report on February 28 purporting to show that the same $61 billion in cuts would cost 700,000 jobs through 2012. In stark contrast to the GAO report on wasteful government spending, liberals on Capitol Hill broadly promoted the findings of these two studies as proof that the House budget would harm the economic recovery.
But wait: How can the Zandi and Goldman studies claim that the spending cuts in the House budget will harm the economy if they came out before the GAO study identifying wasteful government spending? What if all, half, or just some of the spending cuts in the House budget are simply cuts to government waste? Surely these facts would change the outcome of Goldman’s and Zandi’s computer simulations, right? Wrong. The Goldman and Zandi reports have absolutely zero relationship to the real world. They both assume that all government spending, no matter how wasteful or duplicative, not only helps the economy grow but does so by large multipliers. This is the exact same thinking that led the Obama Administration to claim that their $1 trillion stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent when in fact unemployment rose to 10.1 percent. The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl explains why government spending does not stimulate economic growth:
Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It is merely redistributed from one group of people to another.
Congress cannot create new purchasing power out of thin air. If it funds new spending with taxes, it is simply redistributing existing purchasing power (while decreasing incentives to produce income and output). If Congress instead borrows the money from domestic investors, those investors will have that much less to invest or to spend in the private economy. If they borrow the money from foreigners, the balance of payments will adjust by equally raising net imports, leaving total demand and output unchanged. Every dollar Congress spends must first come from somewhere else.
Conservatives believe that the federal government should have limited powers and that—beyond providing for the common defense and enforcing contracts— government should stay out of economic affairs as much as possible. Conservatives believe most federal spending is suspect and should be cut if it has not proven to be effective (such as on programs like COPS, FEMA fire grants, and Head Start). Progressives, on the other hand, see the federal government as a giant jobs program so that any cut to any federal program, no matter how ineffective or wasteful, would be a harm to the economy. If we are ever going to tackle our nation’s true budgetary problems—spending on the entitlement programs Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—we must first defeat the misguided idea that all government spending cuts are bad for the economy.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
6th March 2011 at 10:53 am
Administrator says:
Government waste
Report dissects government spending
Conservative think tank aims to document wasteful government spending
Posted: Mar. 4, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.
The process of evaluating what works and what’s a waste never ends in the private sector. It is a constant churning that results in jobs being lost and re-created, in whole lines being raised and wiped out. Nothing is guaranteed to last forever, let alone a year.
That reality, however, does not apply to the government. Once a program is created, it is all but impossible to get rid of, no matter how inefficient and redundant it might be.
With House Republicans trying to rein in record deficit spending and the Obama administration fighting so-called “Draconian” cuts, Washington’s oversized budget is under a more powerful microscope. And a Government Accountability Office study released Tuesday provided the clearest picture yet of a government awash in overlapping offices.
“The U.S. government has, for example, more than 100 programs dealing with surface transportation issues, 82 that monitor teacher quality, 80 for economic development, 56 for ‘financial literacy,’ 20 offices or programs devoted to homelessness and 17 grant programs for disaster preparedness,” The Washington Post reported this week. “Among other redundancies, 15 agencies or offices handle food safety, and five agencies are working to ensure that the federal government uses less gasoline.”
The GAO report also found plenty of problems with the Pentagon, where each branch of the military has separate offices, systems and personnel dedicated to the health care of service members and veterans.
Of course, the GAO report is nothing especially groundbreaking or surprising. Plenty of lawmakers, including current ones, have tried mightily to cut back the Washington bureaucracy, only to be opposed by howling hordes of special interests and small armies of lobbyists. Every federal office and program has a constituency that will fight until its last breath to keep what they see as theirs.
But it’s not theirs. It’s ours. And we’re broke, with a national debt of $14 trillion and rising, with unfunded entitlement benefits of more than $100 trillion. If Congress can’t use this report to slash at least $100 billion in federal spending right now, in this economy, with this political climate, the cynical taxpaying public will be justified in thinking it never will.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
6th March 2011 at 10:56 am
ssgconway says:
I still have my copy of the Grace Commission report from 1984 that listed 2,478 ways to cut spending and eliminate waste, fraud and duplication without significantly reducing programs, services, or benefits offered by the Federal Government. Grace even paid for the Ridley Scott commercial – “The Deficit Trials of 2017.” It’s a helluva commercial, but it only aired twice. I think that the late Mr. Grace may have been optimistic in his timetable.
Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiBCRQL58_k
We were warned. Before Grace, Goldwater told us, first in 1964 that Social Security was actuarially unsound. He was pilloried and Social security became the ‘third rail’ of American politics. He warned us again in 1976 with “The Coming Breakpoint.” His thesis was that runaway spending would soon become unstoppable and that the result would be ruin. Others told us, too. They did nothing, and I doubt that much will be done now, especially as we have several wars going on and spending for those won’t be touched by those who would dismantle the welfare state.
I’m still waiting for the Rev. John Brown of our age to emerge.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
6th March 2011 at 2:44 pm
marissa says:
Remember Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Awards? Those were always a hoot.
He was a politician with a sense of government absurdity. Someone in Congress needs to step up and take his place.
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
6th March 2011 at 4:29 pm
Opinionated Bloviator says:
“None of the programs listed will be eliminated. NONE.”, Until the economic collapse hits, then ALL of the programs will be eliminated.
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
6th March 2011 at 7:32 am