Taxpayers have saved $178 billion thanks to recommendations in a report that almost no one knows about: the Government Accountability Office’s annual report on duplication, overlap, and fragmentation in the bloated federal government.
GAO has been issuing these reports since 2011. In that time, it has made 798 recommendations for Congress and the executive branch. Full or partial implementation of 76 percent of these recommendations has saved $178 billion.
GAO released its eighth annual report on April 26, 2018, and it was chock-full of commonsense ideas to end eminently absurd federal waste. Overall, the report found “68 new actions that Congress or executive branch agencies could take across 23 areas,” that would achieve financial benefits for taxpayers.
The most common examples of duplication occur in areas that have political benefits for those who create new programs. For example, efforts to improve STEM education, a laudable goal, are duplicated across 163 programs in 13 different agencies that spent $2.9 billion in fiscal year 2016. Not only is this an obvious example of waste, but it fosters a lack of accountability because there is no single person or agency responsible for the policy. Furthermore, the proliferation of these programs has done little to improve the nation’s educational rankings compared to the rest of the world.
GAO cited numerous issues in the Department of Defense. For example, the Coast Guard operates 190 multi-mission boat stations, many of which “provide unnecessarily duplicative search and rescue coverage.” GAO says that eliminating these duplicative stations could save taxpayers millions.
The Pentagon also maintains 256 distribution centers “to store and process goods such as clothing, food, medicine, and repair parts for weapon systems,” many of which go underutilized. Consolidating these duplicative centers could save $527 million over five years.
Other examples include the inspection of imported seafood, which is strangely fragmented between the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service’s responsibility for catfish inspection, and the Food and Drug Administration’s responsibility for all other seafood inspection. This causes both agencies to spend more taxpayer dollars than necessary.
GAO recommended that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the IRS create new safeguards to prevent improper payments through Obamacare’s Premium Tax Credit.
Tax refund fraud costs taxpayers more than $1 billion every year. To stem that tide, GAO recommended a novel idea: The IRS should exercise its existing authority to hold refunds until they are verified.
One of the major underreported problems facing the federal bureaucracy is its lack of modern technology and software. Every year, the federal government spends more than $90 billion on information technology. In 2016, GAO identified 20 departments and agencies that had not inventoried software, including “the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.” Two years later, GAO had to renew its call on these 20 agencies to complete software application inventories immediately, which could save billions.
America’s fiscal situation is dire, with a $21 trillion national debt and trillion-dollar deficits starting in 2019. While Congress and the executive branch wrestle with politically controversial proposals to solve the mess, they should not lose sight of the low-hanging fruit that adds up to tens of billions of dollars saved.
The only way to devour this whale of debt is to take one bite at a time.
Curtis Kalin (@CurtisKalin) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is communications director for Citizens Against Government Waste.
