Thursday, April 07, 2005

Government Waste

The Heritage Foundation recently published their list of Top 10 Examples of Government Waste. (HT: WorldMagBlog). I am a supporter of George W. Bush and his presidency, but the fact remains that he is--in the apropos label of Fred Barnes--a big-government conservative. It is a sad commentary that Republicans (though not necessarily conservatives!) control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency and yet spending and waste continue unabated. Here's my reproduction of the Heritage Foundation list, which totals to about $100 billion in annual waste.

step, lawmakers should address the 10 following examples of egregious waste.

  1. Unreconciled Transactions (transactions which have been made but cannot be accounted for) [$25 billion]
  2. Unused Flight Tickets (270,000 unused commercial airline tickets; even worse, they were fully refundable; on top of that, 27,000 tickets were double paid—purchased by the department and reimbursed to the employee, costing an addition $8 million) [$108 million annually]
  3. Embezzled Funds at the Department of Agriculture (illegal personal purchases with government-issued credit cards)
  4. Credit Card Abuse at the Department of Defense (same as above)
  5. Medicare Overspending (the biggest money-waster of all federal programs, Medicare pays as much as eight times what other federal agencies pay for the same drugs and medical supplies) [$20-30 billion annually]
  6. Funding Fictitious Colleges and Students (plus $21.8 billion worth of student loans are in default)
  7. Manipulating Data to Encourage Spending (the Army Corps of Engineers builds dams and water projects, but in a massive conflict of interest, is tasked with evaluating the science and economics of each proposed project, which results in manipulating the economic studies to justify unworthy projects.)
  8. State Abuse of Medicaid Funding Formulas (the federal government reimburses an average of 57% of each state’s costs, and there is significant waste, fraud, and abuse in state overreporting and shifting of the money they receive)
  9. Earned Income Tax Credit Overpayments
  10. Redundancy Piled on Redundancy (overlap between government programs which should be consolidated)