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As budget fights loom and federal government workers get furlough notices, Congress questions 'tens of billions of dollars' in Washington waste



Republicans and Democrats found rare agreement during a House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee hearing that the federal government wastes too much money - at least $95 billion in lost savings last year alone, according to a new report - but wouldn't agree on how to change things.


An annual report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found hundreds of billions of dollars in Washington waste, fraud and abuse overall, and said the government is too slow in acting to consolidate or eliminate duplicate programs that taxpayers shouldn't be funding.


They include a total of 697 programs in at least 23 separate agencies supporting just one Obama administration initiative: energy sustainability and renewable energy. Those programs' waste cost taxpayers $15 billion in 2010.


Fifteen separate agencies have a total of 76 programs that prevent or treat drug abuse in America, costing more than $4.5 billion in 2012.









Republicans complain that the federal government has spent billions developing electric car technology, but lacks a way to coordinate the hundreds of programs involved. Meanwhile, Democrats carp about lost revenue from oil and gas leases given to energy companies that pay below-market rates



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Lack of coordination: The US Army, Navy (L), Air Force and Marines (R) have their own programs for designing and producing camouflage uniforms, at a cost of tens of billions every year

The various armed services, the report found, are each developing their own uniform camouflage systems without collaborating on a single standard, spending $82 million to do it.

The Department of Veterans Affairs could save more than $1.2 billion by consolidating its training programs.


Federal agencies are spending billions of dollars on sophisticated mapping data that the government may already have.

And the government wastes $14 million running separate programs in three different agencies to inspect catfish.

Overall, the GAO found at least 162 kinds of spending duplication across all the federal government agencies.

'The Obama administration promised to root out redundant programs in the president's budget, but don't count on it,' said Steven Greenhut, the vice president of journalism at the conservative Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity.

'The government is wasteful,' he added, 'regardless of what president is in office ... [T]he real problem is the federal government continues to grow well beyond what is healthy for its citizens.'

'The only solution is to limit the size of government overall ... the chance of anyone seriously rooting out federal waste is somewhere in the ballpark of zero.'




Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Gene Dodaro (L) led a team that produced the annual report on government waste

While committee chairman Darrel Issa blasted the Obama administration for failing to eliminate overlapping programs, the committee's top Democrat, Elijah Cummings, blamed Congress for ignoring most of the recommendations of the government's own spending watchdog.

Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, adopting praised the Obama administration for adopting at least 80 per cent of the GAO's recommendations, but blamed House Republicans for implementing only 32 per cent of the watchdog's advice.

For instance, he said House Democrats would like to see Congress save $2 billion by renegotiating oil & gas leases with private energy companies that drill on government lands.

But Issa, a feisty Republican watchdog from California, said that plan wasn't a cost-savings, but a new tax on energy companies. Gene Dodaro, the Comptroller General of the United States, testified in agreement with him that it's not possible to determine a fair rate for some energy leases since there hasn't been a proper audit to determine the fair market rate and 'figure out what we're owed.'

'We're looking at it as a revenue issue,' Dodaro agreed, framing it in terms of taxes.

Taking a swipe at the Environmental Protection Agency, Issa insisted that the cost of drilling for energy on federal lands was ar greater than just the cost of leasing land from Uncle Sam.

'It is a heck of a deal,' he said, 'until you get into the regulatory time it takes to get an oil well or get a gas well approved sometimes.'



Solar panels are more commonplace overseas than in the US, but the Obama administration has spent trillions of dollars trying to change that. Subsidies to Solyndra and other companies, however, have produced few results as many companies receiving the government dollars in loan guarantees have gone bankrupt



Overall, Dodaro said his agency has 'a plan, [but] it's not being executed and it's not a priority' for the government to save money.

He said the worst offenders, in general, were the Defense Department and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, since they spend gargantuan amounts of money.

Issa called the waste of 'big dollars' a 'self-inflicted wound.'


Under questioning from Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly, Dodaro explained that the so-called tax gap and improper government payments also total an astonishing $500 billion of lost revenue for the Treasury Department.

That includes the $385 billion 'net tax gap,' the total of owed taxes that are not collected.


Dodaro said 84 percent of taxes aren't paid. That, Issa responded, includes a large number of potential taxpayers who participate only in what he said was 'the cash-only economy' and who had never filed a tax return.

Connolly, however, said that gap is a function of having too few tax collectors on the government payroll.

'Why on earth would we leave $385 billion on the table? ... Could it have something to do with resources at the IRS?' Connolly asked.

'Uniforms are interesting,' he also said, 'but when we want to get savings, we ought to look at the big stuff.'






Watchdogs: House oversight chairman Darrell Issa (L) and Senate government affairs committee member Tom Coburn (R) have emerged as the top government-waste agitators on Capitol Hill



Dodaro's report included those tax matters, finding that in all, only 12 per cent of GAO's proposals are fully implemented, with another 66 per cent partially addressed. The remaining 21 per cent, he said, have seen no action at all.




Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn said in a statement Tuesday that 'millions of Americans have been doing more with less,' but 'the federal government continues to do less with more.'

He said that the three most recent GAO reports have identified a total of $295 billion in overlapping government programs, a number that 'could easily cover the costs of sequestration'

The budget sequester is the dreaded forced belt-tightening that has resulted in cutbacks in everything from White House visitor tours to staffing levels.

'Yet, instead of preventing furloughs, reopening air traffic control towers and restoring public access to White House, Congress and the administration continue to defend billions of dollars in duplicative programs that are little more than monuments to the good intentions of career politicians in Washington.'

Coburn issued a joint statement with Delaware Democratic Sen. Carper, who chairs the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Coburn is the committee's ranking Republican.


'With concerns growing over the mounting federal deficit and national debt, the American people deserve a more efficient and effective government,' Carper said.

But he cautioned that 'just because a program is identified by GAO as potentially "duplicative" doesn't mean that it is wasteful or unnecessary. We must now do the hard work in Congress of reviewing the programs ... to determine where we can find efficiencies.'


Coburn called it 'unconscionable and immoral for Congress and the administration to ignore this problem. Every dollar the government takes from a single mom or low-income family to fund an overlapping catfish inspection program is a dollar taxpayers have to earn back by working longer hours.'



'And every dollar we take out of the economy to fund the government’s 679th renewable energy initiative is a dollar that isn’t available for businesses to renew our economy.'



Catfish inspectors? Three separate federal government departments - the FDA, the Food Safety and Inspection Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service - all spend money inspecting farm-raised and imported catfish


'We welcome GAO’s rigorously-researched, data-driven support,” said Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) president Tom Schatz in a statement issued while the oversight committee was still grilling witnesses. 'All the same, it is hard not to be frustrated by the fact that these recommendations have been largely ignored by Congress.'

During the hearing, Georgia Republican Rep. Doug Collins took his own swipe at the duplicative fish inspectors

'I didn't know catfish needed that much inspecting,' he joked. 'When I was little, it was like, "That one looks fine. Put it in the bucket."

And Collins slapped the military for working on separate camouflage uniforms. 'They all like alike,' he said. 'I'd have done it for a lot less.'

Barbara Bovbjerg, GAO's Managing Director for Education, Workforce and Income Security Issues, testified that 'considerably more' than $82 million could be saved if the Department of Defense used a single digital design pattern for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and allowed the services to vary their camouflage by color and modify the uniforms with various pockets and materials to serve their specific needs.

But 'we don't think they have identified anything or done any specific studies,' Bovbjerg said of the Pentagon.




Elijah Cummings, the House oversight committee's top Democrat, focused on the government's failure to extract more money from big oil and gas companies, a tactic that Issa dismissed as a bid for more tax revenue to fund more wasteful programs

Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives who represents the District of Columbia and is one of Congress's most vocal liberals, said duplication and overlap of government services was merely 'the nature of the beast.'


But Tennessee Republican Rep. John Duncan said that while government waste is nothing new and dates back centuries, 'we've allowed the government to become so bug and so bureaucratic that it's out of control.'

Issa framed the hearing by insisting that 'at a time of increased budget pressure, American taxpayers cannot afford to keep buying the same service twice,' Issa said.


The GAO report, he added, 'does note that the recommendations would save tens of billions of dollars annually,' but 'there is no detailed cost-saving associated with each recommendation. This is because federal agencies often cannot tell us how much money is spent on a particular program. Federal agencies also lack meaningful performance metrics for its programs. In fact, Federal agencies cannot even provide a simple list of all programs in their own agency.'



US GOVERNMENT WASTE BY THE NUMBERS



The GAO's 2013 annual report to Congress identified dozens upon dozens of programs it said the government should combine or eliminate, including these gems:

The FDA, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Food Safety and Inspection Service run their own overlapping programs to inspect catfish, charging the government $14 million more each year than they should.
There are 76 programs to prevent or treat drug abuse, spread across 15 agencies and costing $4.5 billion last year.
An astonishing 159 contracting organizations in 10 different Defense Department sub-agencies provide foreign language support to the Pentagon. Eliminating the duplication alone would save between $50 and $200 million.
The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines spend $82 million every year in duplicate efforts to design and produce camouflage uniforms.
The federal government runs 679 separate programs in 23 agencies supporting renewable energy initiatives, at a cost of $15 billion last year. The Obama administration ramped that up from $4 billion in 2008. That amount doesn't include the more than $1 trillion spent on loan guarantees for companies like the solar-energy firm Solyndra, which went bankrupt.
The IRS fails to collect an estimated $385 billion every year in taxes that are owed to the Department of the Treasury, largely because there are million of Americans who have never filed income tax returns.
The Department of Homeland Security spent $568 million in research and developent programs in 2011 alone, despite not having a policy in place to ensure that money isn't spent on things that have already been studied. DHS 'does not know its total annual investment in R&D,' the GAO report stated.
The government spends $4.5 billion every year on 76 drug-abuse prevention and treatment programs in 10 separate cabinet-level agencies, often duplicating efforts and sometimes even competing to serve the same groups of Americans.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, GAO says, is failing to oversee states payments to providers 'that are far in excess of those providers' costs,' resulting in 'hundreds of millions, or billions' lost
The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs will waste $102 billion this year because they don't have computer systems that could share medical records of soldiers when they leave active duty. The GAO implied that the VA often provides needless health care to veterans, or services that the Pentagon has already provided before.


Source: Government Accountability 2013 annual report

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