The United States has always been a nation brimming from one end to the other with pragmatic people blessed with extra helpings of common sense. That’s one of the keys to understanding why Americans have built the richest country on earth, with the most widely distributed prosperity in human history. So how to explain what happens to such folks when they are elected to Congress, come to the nation’s capital and leave that abundant common sense back home? Is there something in the water in Washington that causes the governing class, for instance, to create 45 federal programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars and employing thousands of bureaucrats, all devoted to the same purpose?

The occasion for these editorial musings was provided by the release Tuesday of the Government Accountability Office’s fourth annual report to Congress on improving efficiency and effectiveness in the federal government. These reports were initiated in 2010 at the behest of Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who, unfortunately, is retiring from Congress to deal with some serious health issues. In its first three reports, the GAO pointed to 162 examples of duplication and overlap in federal programs and recommended 380 specific actions Congress could take to achieve billions of dollars in bureaucratic savings.