Washington Whine Leads To Drunken Spending

Liberals' favorite whine, harvested from the vineyard of intentional deceit, goes like this:  attempts to rein in the federal budget will harm the poor, seniors and children.  They view any reduction in spending as anathema because they believe the government should solve all the nation's ills.

Yet there exists a mountain of evidence that the bloated federal budget could be reduced by billions of dollars with virtually no impact on sacrosanct social programs.  Waste, fraud, duplication, swollen government payrolls and pork barrel projects are bleeding taxpayers and draining the budget.

No one in Congress or the executive branch can claim ignorance.  The independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) has been sounding the alarm bells for years.  Their warnings have fallen on deaf ears as Congress has ignored the calls for reform while shoveling more money into flawed programs.

In fact, the government watchdog agency is now required under a new statute to identify duplication in federal programs, agencies, offices and initiatives.  Its first annual report issued in March, the GAO found 34 major examples of overlapping services provided by various agencies.

In one case, the GAO discovered that the federal government administers 47 different employment and job training programs at an annual cost to taxpayers of about $18 billion.  Despite the duplication and inefficiency, Congress unflinchingly continues to stuff money into every one of the programs.

Eliminating overlapping services represents a major opportunity for slicing the federal budget, but there are a whole litany of other financial sins the government commits annually.  Here are just a few areas where the feds are bungling away billions of taxpayer dollars.

1.  The Washington bureaucracy is replete with examples of waste.  For instance, the Internal Revenue Service flushes billions down the toilet every year.  A recent audit by the Treasury Department's Inspector General showed that the IRS made payments of $4.2 billion last year to illegal aliens who paid no federal income taxes.  Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case.  The IRS also delivered $112 million in refunds to prisoners who filed fraudulent returns.  By its own estimate, the IRS has admitted it wastes about $10 billion a year.  The IRS is not the only violator. Every year the GAO issues reports exposing bureaucratic waste in a myriad of federal programs.

2.  In a country founded on limited government, the federal bureaucracy is the largest employer in the United States. The fed payroll includes more than 2.1 million civilians, which excludes the Post Office.  The executive branch of the government, which consists of the office of the president, 15 cabinet departments and 70 independent agencies, accounts for 97 percent of all federal civilian workers.  In addition, there are 945 federal advisory committees and commissions stretching across 52 government agencies, employing thousands of people.  The feds have continued to fatten payrolls while most Americans businesses downsize.  Since 2007, the executive branch has grown 14.8 percent while 6.5 million private sector jobs have disappeared during that timeframe.

3.  Pork Barrel Projects are rampant, despite repeated promises to eliminate funding for programs designed to ingratiate lawmakers to their constituents.  In fiscal 2010, the Citizens Against Government Waste organization identified 9,129 pork projects that cost taxpayers $16.5 billion.   Examples include such doozies as handing out $615,000 so the University of California at Santa Cruz could digitize memorabilia from rock band Grateful Dead and supplying $443,340 to the National Institute of Health for a study of the habits of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

4. Fraud permeates every government agency, sapping taxpayer funds and adding to costs.   Over the last decade, entitlement programs have been a favorite target, including these examples from past years:  Medicare's overpayments to providers once totaled $12.1 billion.  The Food Stamp Program was bilked out of $1.3 billion. The Department of Housing and Urban Development forked over $3.3 billion in payments as a result of fraud and errors.  The Department of Agriculture recently was unable to account for $5 billion in receipts and expenditures.  Read enough?  The bureaucracy is simply too big to manage and there are no incentives to reduce fraud when taxpayer funding allows the government to act irresponsibly without penalty.

Weary taxpayers have every right to demand that Washington clean up this mess before asking for one penny more in taxes from its citizens.  Not only do the feds need to end waste, duplication, fraud and pork barrel spending, but the enormous size of government must be addressed.  

As President Reagan once famously observed,  a government agency "is the closest thing to eternal life we will ever see on earth."  A nation saddled with $15 trillion in debt can no longer afford to stand by and watch its government grow fatter and more wasteful.

Taxpayers are finally sobering up after suffering the hangover effects of the liberals favorite whine. They don't want more binge spending.