Duplication and waste in the federal government

The GAO was out yesterday with the first part of its report on duplication and waste in the federal government. The report covers only programs in about a third of the federal deparments. nevertheless, it identifies literally hundreds of programs that overlap others or even wholly duplicate others. The estimate is that in this portion of the government alone, there is about 200 billion dollars of waste each year due to duplication.

Is anyone surprised? There are something like 80 separate federal programs to help with job training in this country. Many have never even been evaluated as to how well they work. Congress seems only interested in coming up with new programs rather than supervising the old ones. It has to be the case that if these 80 programs were consolidated into 8, the number of supervisory employees could be cut dramatically and the efforts of the government could even be coordinated.

Consolidation and coordination, however, will never happen unless Congress and the president get fully involved. I know someone who spent his career as an analyst for the Social Security Administration. he described his work history as consisting of decades of preparing studies and reports. He was consistently told by his superiors that his work was outstanding and his suggestions for improvement great. But after decades of reports and studies, nothing, literally nothing, was ever changed. Someone outside the bureaucracy has to force changes on that group. No one on the inside will ever see the need to make changes.