Budget Cutting For Dummires ...And Washington Politicians, Part 6 - Government Redundancy

I did not expect to write another post on "Budget Cutting For Dummies ...And Washington Politicians" but when you look around the world of government and politics, the opportunities for curbing Federal government spending keep popping up.

Today's unplanned review is based on a March 1, 2011 Wall Street Journal article that reviewed some detailed research conducted by the General Accounting Office (GAO) of the Federal government. Their efforts identified serious redundancy in government organizational functions and responsibilities, a redundancy that costs the American taxpayer between $100 and $200 billion a year in inefficiencies and waste.

According to the article, the GAO's detailed findings include the following:

- The Federal government has 15 different agencies overseeing food safety laws.
- There are more than 20 different programs to help the homeless.
- There are 80 programs for economic development. These 80 programs are spread across 4 different Federal agencies.
- Of these 80 economic development programs, four different Federal agencies have a combined 52 different programs that fund entrepreneurial efforts, 35 programs fund infrastructure, and 26 different programs fund telecommunications activities.
- There are 82 Federal programs to improve teacher quality. These 82 programs are spread across 10 different Federal agencies.
- There are 80 programs to help disadvantaged Americans with their transportation needs.
- There are 47 programs addressing job training and employment.
- There are 56 programs to help Americans understand finances.
- There are 20 programs that support business incubators.
- There 19 different programs that support tourism.
- There are 18 programs, which spend a combined $62.5 billion a year, to address food and nutrition aid.
- There are 100 different programs across five divisions within the Transportation Department that all fund efforts for highways, rail projects, and safety programs.
- The GAO report found that there were 130,000 government military medical professionals, 59 Defense Department hospitals, and hundreds of military medical clinics that could benefit from consolidating their overhead functions and expenses.

What happens when you have such chaos in your functions and responsibilities? According to the GAO report:

- These overlapping and duplicative programs cost the Federal budget billions of dollars every year.
- With so many programs, government policies can end up contradicting each other and conflict with each other even though they are intended for the same purpose.
- There is substantial, unnecessary overhead since each different government program has its own administrative and other common expenses, costs that would go away if the efforts were better consolidated and made more efficient.
- There are thousands of government programs in place but very few of them have any quantitative idea what the impact of each effort or program has on the country.

Thus, we arrive at another example where everyone in Washington is in charge but no one is responsible. How can you know what impact you are having on teacher quality and what is causing those impacts, negatively or positively, if responsibility is spread out over 10 Federal agencies? Impossible to measure, quantify, and manage. You not only end up with redundancy which wastes money but with no one in charge, there is no accountability to drive down costs while driving up effectiveness.

As outlined in Step 1 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," the Federal government needs a complete ground up overhaul in order to consolidate functions, eliminate waste, and identify the stakeholders responsible for performance. There is no other way to run an efficient human organization. If everyone is in charge, no one is accountable.

If there is indeed upwards of $200 billion of budget savings to be had, why is no one going after the problem? The GAO report provides the template to get started. Could it be that our political class is so pompous and full of themselves that something as mundane as consolidating redundant government functions is too boring and not dramatic enough to feed their egos? Could it be that they actually do not know how to accomplish the task even though the GAO blazed the path for them?

I do not know but their hesitancy or inability to proceed ends up in the same bad results: wasted money, inefficiency, low effectiveness, and no way of knowing what works. Sounds like a dumb way to run a government.





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