A lot of hard decisions will have to be made to get our nation's debt under control, but cutting duplicative and wasteful programs within the federal budget should be a no-brainer.
Every year the Government Accountability Office (GAO) puts out a report identifying billions of dollars' worth of waste in the federal budget, and every year these suggestions go ignored. That is simply unacceptable.
Last week, I introduced the Improving All Government Efficiency Act in the House. My bill will force federal agencies to implement suggestions for waste reduction identified in GAO’s reports. Each agency that chooses to ignore them will face an automatic 1% budget cut every year.
To read GAO's reports, please visit www.gao.gov/duplication/overview.
2 comments:
Fantastic.
If someone, anyone, Sam Graves or whoever, want to "cut wasteful programs" then by God, let them start with where we spend--and waste--the most money, far and away.
Let them start with none other than the US Department of Defense.
We spend more there than any other department in our government, we waste more and more is completely, totally, utterly unaccounted for.
Let the cutting begin. Please.
Let them start with none other than the US Department of Defense.
We spend more there than any other department in our government....
Not even close. Going by categories, we spend the most money on healthcare, followed by Social Security. Defense is something like 16% of the total, is uniquely a responsibility of the Federal government and explicitly in the Constitution, and without doing a good enough job on it, all the other functions of government are pointless.
Sure, there's waste, that's inevitable in anything the government does, but there is no prize for a second best military. And to claim it's "completely, totally, utterly accounted for" is ludicrous. We know exactly how much we spend on the various categories, e.g. in FY 2013 we spent $1.483 billion on family housing according to Wikipedia, we know how much is being spent on procurement, heck, a lot of this is put up for bid and the details are public before the winner is chosen.
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