OPINION:
Ever since the Grace Commission issued its final report during the administration of Ronald Reagan, Washington politicians have been promising to do something about the federal government’s waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars.
They’ve talked about it a lot, but that’s been about it. There’s too much government to audit and examine. Congress can’t keep up with it all, and it gave up trying. There are only so many days on a legislative calendar, after all.
It’s time to get eyes on the ball. All the spending related to the pandemic has pushed the national debt up around $20 trillion. Bidenflation is making it worse, driving up the cost of debt service. Something has to be done before America becomes Greece circa 2009.
The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is pushing things in the right direction. On Wednesday, it held a hearing on the Government Accountability Office’s “High-Risk List” of major mismanaged federal programs that are also hotbeds of waste and fraud.
Asked to put a dollar figure on what they cost the taxpayers, GAO Comptroller General Gene Dorado told the committee that the “incomplete estimate” was close to $250 billion over the last year.
“Since 2003,” he added, “these estimates have totaled $2.3 trillion.”
In case anyone’s counting, that’s about 10% of the total current U.S. debt. Over time, the pennies add up. As several members of the committee pointed out, there’s a lot that can be done going forward to reduce the amount of fraud that occurs. That includes banning self-certification, the implementation of a control plan requirement for all emergency loan programs, and the recognition that any new program over $100 million “should be automatically deemed prone to improper payments,” as one committee member suggested.
Prioritizing the big programs while watching out for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement is the obvious move. That, however, may signal to the bureaucrats who administer and mismanage less costly, less contentious programs that Congress isn’t going to be paying as much attention to them.
That would be a mistake. Smaller programs probably contribute at least as much to the overall problem, especially if no one gets caught doing what they shouldn’t. The Department of Homeland Security’s two-decade effort to modernize its financial management systems, a nonprofit group recently charged, has wasted hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars largely because the people in charge overlooked real-world best practices and lessons learned.
The group’s report urged Congress to engage in “a thorough risk assessment” to figure out how it happened and why it’s been going on for so long. The same document, produced by the Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council, identified other problems as well, including a recent debacle by the Coast Guard that reportedly cost taxpayers an additional $1 billion to mitigate.
Even in an era of projected $2.2 trillion annual deficits, $1 billion is still a lot of money — and there are plenty of better ways to spend it than to hand it over to spendthrifts and fraudsters. Somehow Congress seems to be missing the point that, when left unchecked, the cost of waste, fraud and mismanagement adds up over time.
That seems to be what happened and is happening at DHS and, we expect, at every other agency of the U.S. government. The problem isn’t a lack of tax revenue, as the Democrats like to say. Reagan had it right when he said, “Government is too big, and it spends too much.”
That was the case in the 1970s when he started saying it, and it’s the case now. The focus on the larger programs on the GAO High-Risk List is welcome but should not be allowed to detract from the need to get every government program under the congressional microscope now and again. If rooting it all out requires more congressional subcommittees with more staff, that’s an idea that should be considered. Fund it out of the savings their work generates. That will be incentive enough to root out a lot of the waste.
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