Amelia Kuntzman of EPIC just released another great report about the Government Accountability Office (GAO). She offers recommendations that Congress can’t afford to ignore. But it brings home why improving efficiency, while an important goal, falls short of what Congress must do.
There is no doubt that GAO is the place Congress could look if it wanted to become more efficient. Kuntzman writes:
GAO reported that as of March 2024, there were 5,480 unused recommendations. The agency estimates that implementing unused recommendations with a measurable financial benefit would reduce the deficit by between $106 and $208 billion, with a median of $151 billion.
Unused recommendations that would save $1 billion or more involve Medicare, COVID-19 tax relief, public-safety broadband network, and student loans.
Medicare recommendation alone would save $141 billion.
The GAO regularly reports on improper payments and fraud in federal programs. Here for instance:
the federal government could be losing between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud. Additionally, federal agencies reported an estimated $236 billion in improper payments in FY 2023, and cumulative federal improper payment estimates have totaled about $2.7 trillion since FY 2003.
It also writes sentences like this:
GAO has found that these payments represent a material deficiency or weakness in internal controls. Specifically, GAO has noted that the federal government is unable to determine the full extent of its improper payments or to reasonably assure that appropriate actions are taken to reduce them.
And it makes charts like this one:
Kuntzman concludes:
A median savings of $151 billion from these unused recommendations equates to about $1,140 in taxpayer dollars that could be returned to every single household in America.
During an era of unsustainable debt and high cost of living, Congress owes it to the American people to preserve precious taxpayer dollars and implement the GAO recommendations to the fullest extent possible.
She is so right, and we should all put pressure on members of Congress and demand that they listen to GAO.
That said, the federal government could be as efficient as it should be and yet it would still spend hundreds of billions of dollars that it shouldn’t be spending. This problem can be addressed only by having an honest conversation about the role of the federal government. Let’s ask which programs should be devolved to the state and local governments, and which programs and agencies should be abolished altogether.
More often than not, the government fails us because it is inherently incapable of performing certain tasks well, and the incentives inside the halls of Congress and of bureaucracies aren’t geared to making things better — even if all of our most visible elected officials were smart, compassionate, and well-intentioned. In addition, the government is too big to be overseen effectively.
The only solution is to make the government smaller, not merely more efficient. That will help restore the Founders’ vision and reduce the government’s footprint and interference in our lives.