Cutting government waste better than “sequester”

A few months ago, I helped a municipality deal with a U.S. government agency that wanted to buy services from the town. 

My experience revealed a lot about why the federal budget is out of control.

The amount of the contract was less than $200,000, but I dealt with five federal officials for about two months to get an agreement that should have taken one person about an hour.

The officials questioned the profit margin in the deal, so I had to convince them that the town charges actual cost and makes no profit.

When we received the federal contract, it referred to about a dozen previously unmentioned requirements that were tacked onto it.  The town would have to agree to them before it could supply the federal government with a municipal service that it usually provided to anybody within its borders – without any contract.

It took some effort to find out what these other documents contained.  When I finally saw them, they were mostly irrelevant.  Under one, the town had to promise that its employees would not text while driving.  There was no driving involved in the contract.

At the end of the process, I was convinced that the federal government could have saved thousands of dollars, if it operated more efficiently.

But presidential appointees heading such agencies are unlikely to spend the time and effort to manage agency operations to eliminate such waste. 

With all the talk about cutting government spending, most critics want to slash entire programs, each with its own constituency, rather than really getting serious about efficiency and wasteful spending.

Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, is an archconservative who would like to cut back government.  But he has come up with a non-ideological idea that could work.

In 2010, he got Congress to ask the non-partisan Government Accountability Office to draw up a list of all government programs.  The GAO was also to show where they overlapped.

It may amaze some that there was no single list of federal government programs.  Less amazing is the fact that of the hundreds of programs, many overlap.

For example, the GAO found 47 job training and employment programs being carried out by nine different agencies.  These programs had budgets totaling $18 billion a year. 

And the politically neutral agency reported that all but three of the programs overlapped one another.

Without proposing that any of the programs should be eliminated, the report showed that there were many duplicative managerial and administrative offices that could be dropped.

One of the major risks when many programs do the same thing is that outside organizations can apply for and receive grants for the same activity from several different agencies that have no idea what others are funding.

Why can’t such overlap be eliminated?

Many federal programs, including those run by the Defense Department, are supported because they create jobs.  For a member of Congress to bring new jobs to his or her state or district is far more important politically than the tasks performed.

And then there’s turf.  Various programs doing just about the same thing are under the jurisdiction of separate congressional committees.  Each is reluctant to give up control of any subject or agency on its agenda.

Even more serious are the turf empires of the major departments themselves.  Power and influence may be measured in Washington by the number of employees in an agency or the size of its budget.

Each agency lobbies congressional committees to preserve its programs, each of which is “essential.”

Shouldn’t there be one central office responsible for reducing the inefficiency that results from duplication?

That should be the White House Office of Management and Budget, which finally got around to looking at Coburn’s initiative last year, but only selected a few agencies for a pilot program.  Since then, nothing more has been heard from OMB.

At the beginning of March, the first automatic cuts in federal spending – called the sequester – went into effect.  They amount to $85 billion in the remaining seven months of the federal fiscal year.

Eliminating duplication in the government programs found by GAO in just the first two years of its review plus requiring greater efficiency might well produce that amount of saving not only this year but every year.

No activity needs to be eliminated, though jobs would be cut and the size of government reduced by simply making it more efficient.

Sequester?  We can do better.  After all the empty political promises about cutting government waste, Coburn has helped us know just what to do.