by Wallace White
A rule requiring the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to publish annual reports on wasteful spending has saved billions of taxpayer dollars since 2011, according to an Open the Books report released Wednesday.
Former Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn amended the Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 to to require The GAO is to include in its annual report an investigation into duplication of spending across government units, which has saved the government $667.5 billion since its first report in 2011, According to Open the Books. Congress, however, has made efforts to stifle the GAO’s mission, threatening to cut its funding shortly after its first report, and has been slowest to adopt GAO’s recommendations for reducing waste.
“The federal government spends so much money that literally no one can tell taxpayers how many different programs exist across the executive branch,” Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s thanks to the tenacity of the late Senator Tom Coburn that Congress is obligated to do something to root out duplicative, wasteful spending. Without the Coburn Rule, Congress would happily continue to throw money out the door, and each committee would operate as its own fiefdom, making spending decisions in a vacuum.”
According to the report, federal agencies resolved 75 percent of the GAO’s 2018 recommendations, while Congress resolved only 46 percent of the office’s 140 recommendations. As of today, 549 recommendations remain open and incompletely implemented.
“Despite the best efforts of some lawmakers, they were cowed into upholding the Coburn Rule, allowing the GAO to continue to highlight waste — a win for taxpayers that has lasted more than a decade and saved hundreds of billions of dollars,” Andrzejewski told DCNF.
The Defense Department has been the most wasteful agency since 2011, with 99 open cost-cutting recommendations, 68 of which have gone completely unaddressed, according to Open the Books. But defense spending across the government saved the most since 2011, when GAO recommendations were implemented and $197 billion was saved through March.
The Department of Health and Human Services is the second most wasteful, with 40 unaddressed and 17 partially addressed GAO recommendations, according to the report. Health spending followed a similar pattern to defense spending, saving the second most from GAO recommendations, with $159 billion in savings through March.
The Agriculture Department did not address any of the 12 open recommendations, according to the report. The government saved $45 billion by implementing GAO recommendations for the agricultural mission area.
Andrzejewski believes agencies generally do a better job of implementing GAO recommendations than Congress.
“Our data analysis has proven something that taxpayers could easily sense,” Andrzejewski told DCNF. “Federal agencies are following GAO recommendations and cutting unnecessary spending much more thoroughly than Congress, which continues to drag its feet and implement less than half of the recommendations.”
In 2014, Coburn introduced the Let Me Google That For You Act, which aimed to eliminate the antiquated National Technical Information Service — a program that was losing $1 million a year by charging fees for government reports that were freely available online, according to the report. The bill never passed, but the agency eventually reused three years later, in 2017.
The majority of GAO recommendations were related to “improving public safety and security, accounting for 37 percent of the total, according to the report. The next largest topic area was “business processes and management,” which accounted for 23 percent of GAO recommendations.
The GAO was created by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 in response to financial mismanagement during World War I. According to to the GAO website. The act also required the executive branch to participate in setting the government budget for the year, and the GAO was created as an independent part of the executive branch to oversee spending.
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Wallace White is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “United States Capitol” by Joshua Santos.
