I don’t believe that we can’t fix our budget problems by only focusing on “waste, fraud, and abuse.” However, I find it very disheartening (not to mention annoying) to hear over and over again that lawmakers faced with a government program that’s duplicative or doesn’t work still refuse to end the spending on it. According to the Hill:
Congress and the Obama administration have scrapped just a fraction of the duplicative programs targeted for cuts by Government Accountability Office (GAO), the agency’s chief told lawmakers Wednesday.
Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro said just 12 percent of more than 300 recommendations issued by GAO since 2011 to eliminate, combine or modify duplicative programs have been fully carried out. […]
Among its findings is the existence of two separate programs responsible for federal catfish inspections, 76 different drug abuse programs and a general lack of coordination between departments charged with providing veterans services.
The Pentagon has wasted $82 million in unnecessary expenses for military uniforms that now come in seven different camouflage patterns. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is in danger of losing $8.35 billion over 10 years on an unproven Medicare Advantage bonus program, the GAO found.
The report identified billions more in revenue lost as a result of untargeted enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service and dozens of contracts awarded by the Department of Homeland Security that overlapped with activities already conducted elsewhere in the department. Together the contracts totaled roughly $66 million.
As always, Senator Coburn should be commended for his constant efforts to expose the vast amount of government waste taking place in every agency, including in the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. I wrote about some of the senator’s efforts on that front here.
The problem obviously is that Congress and the executive branch (this one and others) in this case are often more concerned about catering to interest groups than protecting the interests of taxpayers. These programs should be terminated, but they benefit entrenched constituencies who don’t care that taxpayers’ money is being wasted or that a given program isn’t delivering results, or even that it is actually hurting those it is supposed to help.
Public-choice economists such as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock have spent their career exposing all the ways that government fails, including the way that interest groups capture bureaucracies and politicians to do their bidding. If you are interested in an overview of their work, you can read this piece by Jane Shaw over athe the Library of Economic and Liberty. She writes:
Public choice takes the same principles that economists use to analyze people’s actions in the marketplace and applies them to people’s actions in collective decision making. Economists who study behavior in the private marketplace assume that people are motivated mainly by self-interest. Although most people base some of their actions on their concern for others, the dominant motive in people’s actions in the marketplace—whether they are employers, employees, or consumers—is a concern for themselves. Public choice economists make the same assumption—that although people acting in the political marketplace have some concern for others, their main motive, whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists, or bureaucrats, is self-interest. In Buchanan’s words the theory “replaces… romantic and illusory… notions about the workings of governments [with]… notions that embody more skepticism.” […]
Public choice economists also examine the actions of legislators. Although legislators are expected to pursue the “public interest,” they make decisions on how to use other people’s resources, not their own. Furthermore, these resources must be provided by taxpayers and by those hurt by regulations whether they want to provide them or not. Politicians may intend to spend taxpayer money wisely. Efficient decisions, however, will neither save their own money nor give them any proportion of the wealth they save for citizens. There is no direct reward for fighting powerful interest groups in order to confer benefits on a public that is not even aware of the benefits or of who conferred them. Thus, the incentives for good management in the public interest are weak. In contrast, interest groups are organized by people with very strong gains to be made from governmental action. They provide politicians with campaign funds and campaign workers. In return they receive at least the “ear” of the politician and often gain support for their goals.
The whole thing is here.