Feds sitting on billions of dollars of unused assets

The federal government is sitting on billions of dollars in money and valuable resources it no longer needs and could capitalize on to help reduce the deficit or pay for other priorities, Congress’s chief investigative arm reported Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office released its latest report on duplication within the government, and found that despite some progress in cutting out programs, dozens of agencies are still doing the same jobs in areas such as job training or treating those with mental illnesses. Twenty different agencies, meanwhile, are involved in consumer product safety oversight.

But some of the most striking findings came in financial assets the government is holding — particularly its oil stockpile.

GAO chief Gene Dodaro said the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, at 691 million barrels of crude oil, is worth some $45 billion. But with U.S. production skyrocketing, reserves within the country make it possible to reduce the stockpile.

Investigators said the government could easily sell off some $7 billion in oil while still maintaining a huge reserve and meeting its legal obligations.

“There may be the potential to reap billions of dollars of savings,” Mr. Dodaro told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in presenting his findings.

GAO also identified other money the government is sitting on, including a $1.6 billion revolving fund at the Treasury Department dedicated to an environmental cleanup that’s already been completed. Liquidating that money could provide more immediate cash for the government.

“GAO’s findings demonstrate that simply spending more money and creating more programs is not the solution to society’s ills,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the committee, in receiving the report.

Duplication has become a major focus for both Congress and the administration after former Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, managed to work language into a 2010 law that required the GAO to do study redundancies.

Mr. Coburn said the reports belie the claims from both the administration and some Republicans and Democrats in Congress that the government budget has been trimmed enough in recent years.

“GAO is seeing double nearly everywhere it looks and that should leave taxpayers seeing red,” Mr. Coburn said in a statement to The Washington Times. “By once again identifying billions of dollars spending on unnecessary duplication, much of it within the Pentagon, GAO has disproven the claims of Washington politicians and bureaucrats that there is nothing left to cut in the budget.”

This year’s report is the fifth iteration.

The previous four listed 188 different areas of overlap, and detailed 440 different actions Congress and the Obama White House could take to try to fix things. Of those, 169 actions have been completed — saving the government more than $20 billion so far, with another $80 billion in savings expected by 2023.

But that still leaves billions of dollars more still to be wrung out of previously identified inefficiencies and the two dozen new areas in the 2015 report, the GAO said.

Among the potential waste or duplication items GAO found were:

⦁ The Social Security Administration has cut its reviews of childhood disability claims by 70 percent, even though those reviews oftentimes find that the recipients were no longer eligible for the benefits they were claiming. The savings over five years could total $3.5 billion, the GAO said.

⦁ Medicare could restructure the way it pays cancer hospitals, which is based on a 1980s model. Restructuring could save $500 million a year.

⦁ More than 100 federal programs are aimed at helping those with serious mental illness, though coordination is lacking, the GAO said. It recommended the Health and Human Services Department take the lead in coordinating the government’s efforts.

⦁ The Department of Homeland Security’s open-records process is so dysfunctional that some requests for immigration information have to be processed by two separate agencies.

“Today, DHS is responsible for more than half of all reported backlogged FOIA requests. That is completely unacceptable,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, said.