News flash: government is inefficient. In the latest version of its annual report on government efficiency and effectiveness, the Government Accountability Office identified 92 actions, in 37 areas of government, that could be taken to reduce “fragmentation, overlap and duplication” and otherwise make the federal government more efficient and cost-effective.
Overpayments from benefits programs was a common theme. Better screening for fraud and applicants’ program eligibility, and more aggressive recovery of overpayment errors, could save billions of dollars for Medicare, billions for Social Security’s Disability Insurance program, billions more from the Internal Revenue Service and hundreds of millions for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ Post-9/11 GI Bill program.
The National Park Service could generate millions in additional recreation user fees if parks reviewed their fee structures more often and Congress amended the user fee program. The government could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in ammunition storage and disposal costs simply by transferring unneeded supplies to federal, state and local governments in need of them. Similarly, the Defense Department could save federal civilian agencies millions of dollars by offering them other excess personal property, so that those agencies do not have to purchase it elsewhere.
Though there are some high-profile examples of large amounts of government waste, fraud and abuse, particularly in the largest expenditures like entitlement programs and defense spending, most government waste harms taxpayers in the form of a thousand cuts. Those thousands of examples of waste and inefficiency, spread across the entirety of government, add up.
So while the GAO report is not the sexiest of documents, it serves to remind us of the inefficiency of government services and all the myriad ways our money is frittered away in bureaucratic offices every day.