Government waste has been largely ignored for years and the redundant and frivolous spending is causing the Obama administration to lose its battle to scare the public into outrage.
Finally federal agencies have been asked to identify the unnecessary or wasteful programs within their agency that could be eliminated as an alternative to the spending cuts mandated by sequestration by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA).
“We cannot avert sequestration without a plan to end the undisciplined and unsustainable federal spending that resulted in the sequester in the first place,” Issa said a letter sent to the acting heads of 17 federal agencies. “Raising taxes on the American people for a second time this year is not the solution to sequestration,” the letter states.
“It is time for the federal government to eliminate wasteful and duplicative programs, in addition to making reductions in non-essential agency programs,” Issa continued. “The President agrees. He cited cutting government spending on ‘wasteful programs that don’t work’ as part of his preferred alternative to the sequester. I am writing to request your assistance in identifying such programs.”
The letter cites the hundreds of recommendations of wasteful or duplicative spending that the Committee has received from inspectors general as examples of cuts that could be implemented in the short term to meet the required $85 billion in spending reductions.
The Committee is holding the first in a series of hearings on implementing more recommendations made by inspectors general on Tuesday, March 5th at 10:00 a.m. The hearing will focus on reducing waste and improving efficiency at the Department of Education and the Department of Transportation and will be streaming online at oversight.house.gov.
According to Senator Tom Coburns’ Waste Book 2012:
• A $1.5 million grant was awarded to the University of Utah to study building a better computer gaming joystick.
• $100,000 to send a three-member American comedy troupe on a tour of India.
• Part of a $325,000 grant used to build a robotic squirrel, all to test whether it could scare a real snake.
• The National Institutes of Health spent $939,771 on a study to discover that a male fruit fly, given the choice between a young female and an older female fly, chose the younger.
• Waterloo, Iowa, is spending $145,000 in federal taxpayers’ money to put a statue of Lou Henry Hoover, the wife of the 31st president, in a new roadside park at the site of the Hoovers’ former home.
• The $300,000 USDA is spending to tell Americans to eat caviar, one of the world’s most expensive delicacies.
• An unused Ohio bridge — not even connected to a road or trail — received a half-a-million dollar makeover this year.
• An Oregon town will pay $388,000 for just five bus stops –enough to buy two houses in the same town!
• In West Virginia, thousands of dollars were spent to reconstruct a historic streetscape… out of Legos.
According to Coburn, “Each of the 100 entries highlighted by this report, therefore, is a direct result of Washington politicians who are preoccupied with running for re-election rather than running the country, which is what they were elected to do in the first place.”
Coburn asks taxpayers to “to look at these examples, put your personal political persuasion aside and ask yourself: Would you agree with Washington that these represent national priorities, or would you conclude these reflect the out-of-touch and out-of-control spending threatening to bankrupt our nation’s future?”
Letter recipients:
• U.S. Department of Agriculture
•U.S. Department of Commerce
• Department of Defense
• U.S. Department of Education
• U.S. Department of Energy
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
• U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
• Department of Homeland Security
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Department of the Interior
• U.S. Department of Justice
• U.S. Department of Labor
• U.S. Small Business Administration
• U.S. Department of State
• U.S. Department of Transportation
• Department of the Treasury
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs