GAO: Government wastes billions -- who knew?

Earlier in the week, I wrote a column about how our federal government overlords have a penchant for giving our money away as if it were their own. And often times the money goes to the undeserving. In it, I concentrated on a $1 million payment the Justice Department is gifting to the state of Florida, city of Parkland and Broward County to help defer the costs of the massive response to the Parkland school shooting. My beef wasn't just the million-dollar gift, but that the feds were in effect rewarding them for the incompetence of the cowards of Broward County – that it would not have cost so much if the deputies had done their jobs in the first place.

Fortuitously, a day later, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a 33-page report chronicling wasteful government spending. Who knew we had a governmental office that actually cares about what the feds spend our money on?

Well, I'm sure we all knew, yet the surprising part is that the GAO actually does a pretty good job at ferreting out wasteful spending. A government department that does what its name implies. Huh.

The report is entitled: "Government Efficiency and Effectiveness." No, this not a joke, and yes, you may stop laughing. It is subtitled: "Opportunities to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits."

Within the report, virtually all government departments and agencies are dinged for wasteful, overlapped and duplicative spending – different departments spending money on the same programs and services.

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In the condensed version of the report, the authors site no less than 724 areas of waste over the past eight years. In this latest version (2018), they found 68 new actions that need to be addressed. Of the 724, the GAO claims that 365 have been fully addressed and add that "the remaining actions could save tens of billions of dollars."

The report claims:

"Every year, we identify and report on federal agencies, programs, and initiatives with fragmented, overlapping, or duplicative goals or activities; and ways to reduce costs or enhance revenue. The government saves money when it takes the actions we've proposed – saving an estimated $178 billion so far by fully or partially addressing 76 percent of our recommendations. This has resulted in about $178 billion in financial benefits, of which $125 billion has been realized and at least an additional $53 billion is estimated to accrue."

So according to the GAO, we've saved an estimate $178 billion so far. The logical question to ask would then be: If we've saved all this money, why haven't we cut the federal budget by $178 billion? We haven't, of course. It grows larger every year. So the next reasonable question would be: Where and to whom is that sizable amount of "saved" money being funneled?

A further question would be: Why aren't our fiscal hawks in the Republican majority asking these same questions? Answer: It appears that few in Congress care enough.

The Daily Caller, however, did find one such Republican. He is Rep. Steve Russell of Oklahoma. Russell stated, "We can save billions more by taking actions at just three agencies: the Department of Defense, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services."

"Through GAO's annual reports, more than half of all corrective actions have been directed at these three agencies. Yet all three have more than 40 percent of recommended actions still open," Russell said. "Still open" is a nice way of saying that the three departments have just ignored the GAO recommendations. "We know there is only so much GAO can do," the congressman added. "It is up to agencies to take your recommendations to heart and to act on them."

Let's hope they do, and let's hope someone suggests that the federal budget be cut by the amount we have saved. You may resume your laughter.