Nobody with even minimal knowledge of how public bureaucracies work should be surprised by the Government Accountability Office’s conclusion that there is a “staggering level of duplication” in the federal government. Duplication is inevitable when professional politicians in both major parties go for decades using tax dollars to buy votes among favored constituencies, and reward friends, former staffers, family members and campaign contributors with heaping helpings from the pork barrel. With the inevitable program duplication also comes an endless supply of official duplicity as presidents, senators and representatives rationalize spending billions of tax dollars on programs they know either don’t work as promised, or that perform the same or similar functions as existing efforts and are therefore redundant. “This report will make us look like jackasses,” Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., predicted Monday when he read an advance copy of the GAO report. No stranger to uncovering wasteful federal spending (Senate colleagues didn’t dub him “Dr. No” for nothing), Coburn said the GAO identified as much as $200 billion that could be saved if only Congress and President Obama would truly get serious about cutting the fat out of the federal budget. The GAO conducted its review as a result of a Coburn-sponsored amendment adopted by the Senate on a unanimous vote in January 2010. Since he was first elected to the Senate in 2004, Coburn has been a one-senator wrecking crew targeting government waste, including most recently his discovery that federal officials have sent nearly $1 billion to an estimated 250,000 dead people since 2000.

What the GAO found is indeed eye-opening. Here are just some of the many examples of duplicative spending cited by the congressional watchdog agency: