GAO details billions in savings addressing federal government inefficiencies and waste

posted at 12:42 pm on March 1, 2011 by Bruce McQuain
[ Congress ]   

We have all heard the phrase, “waste, fraud and abuse” and most of us usually identify it is a device used by politicians who aren’t really serious about cutting spending.  It is normally used as a means of avoiding discussion of specific cuts in spending to a much more broad and general area that never really gets addressed.  Targeting “waste, fraud and abuse” are a way to avoid spending cuts while pretending to be interested in them.

But today the GAO released a report in which it identified billions of dollars to be saved by the federal government that can only be described by those three words.  Smart politicians will grab this report with both hands and vow to address the specifics immediately since the bottom line savings are significant.

Most of the savings would fall in the “waste” category driven by fragmented programs spread over many agencies with little or no coordination and communication between them.  The inefficiencies common to huge bureaucratic institutions such as government are common and in the case of the GAO’s report, eminently fixable.  For instance:

An analysis of 18 different programs across three federal agencies that deal with domestic food assistance found that though multiple programs can ensure the needy have access to food, “administrative costs increase significantly,” with GAO estimating a $62.5 billion expense to the government from overlap and duplication.

That is a sizable sum.  That is also a problem, if address properly, that can be fixed and become much more efficient and less costly.  What has caused the proliferation of all of these different programs is, unfortunately, an institutional problem mostly found in Congress:

“Congress is often to blame,” the report reads in bold type for emphasis, as the report details $2.9 billion in overlap in 20 homeless programs spread throughout seven different agencies. “Fragmentation and overlap in some of these programs may be due in part to their legislative creation as separate programs under the jurisdiction of several agencies,” the report finds.

One of the common sense fixes to this is to require any new legislation proposed be researched in detail to see if what is being proposed is already in existence in some form.  Secondly, clear lines of authority and responsibility should be delineated, subject to overwatch and enforced.  And finally, if the program or a similar program exist, Congress should focus any effort proposed in the new legislation on improving the performance of the existing program vs. creating even more bureaucracy, redundancy and overlap.

DoD has one of the worst records in this area of any governmental department.  Call it bureaucratic ossification if you like, but the bureaucracy built up over the years, especially in the procurement end of things, has become so large and unwieldy that wast and abuse are rampant.   Not necessarily through intent, but simply because of its size and the inefficiencies such size create.

The Defense Department takes a number of hits in the report. The GAO found many instances of duplication in the sprawling agency. The use of “urgent need” funds have been expanded, GAO found, with “multiple places for a warfighter to submit” such requests. GAO found that the Pentagon has “no tracking mechanism” for these funds, resulting in an estimated $77 billion in overlap since 2005.

Again, significant money.  And the fact that the Pentagon has no real tracking mechanism for the funds is simply unacceptable.  A problem that has been crying for a solution for years – and there is no better time than now to apply it.

The study came as a result of a request by Congress to look specifically at “federal programs, agencies, offices, and initiatives with duplicative goals and activities, to estimate the cost of such duplication, and to make recommendations to Congress for consolidation and elimination of such duplication.

They apparently got more than they expected in the report.  As one Senator said about the release of the report, it ”will make us all look like jackasses.”

Not really Senator – that would actually be an upgrade.

Of course, now comes the hard part - doing the necessary hard work legislatively and through oversight to eliminate the waste and inefficiency identified by the GAO.  Perhaps, if done swiftly and efficiently Congress will earn that  upgrade to “jackasses” from – this is a family friendly blog, isn’t it?

Never mind.
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Bruce McQuain blogs at Questions and Observations (QandO), Blackfive, the Washington Examiner and the Green Room.

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