A Rare Government Spending Success Story – OpEd

Paying attention to government spending is often both a thankless and depressing task. What makes it that way are the horrible incentives that politicians and bureaucrats have. Too many politicians see spending whatever their supporters want as their easy ticket to election and re-election. Meanwhile, bureaucrats have perverse incentives to run through every dollar the politicians authorize them to spend because if they don’t use it, they lose it. The result is often highly wasteful spending.

That is why it is such an unusual occurrence to find a success story related to government spending. Stories involving success in stopping wasteful government spending are so rare that when you come across one, it’s a special occurrence.

A new fiscal watchdog Open the Books report finds a rare government spending success story. The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Wallace White reports:

A rule requiring the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to publish annual reports on wasteful spending has saved billions of taxpayer dollars since 2011, according to an Open the Books report released Wednesday.

Former Republican Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn amended the Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 to require the GAO to include an investigation into duplicate spending between government entities in its annual report, which has saved the government $667.5 billion since its first report in 2011, according to Open the Books.

Because Coburn’s anti-spending duplication amendment has been successful, the U.S. national debt is nearly two percent smaller today than it would have been without it.

Open the Books’ analysis also uncovered the root cause of the U.S. government’s spending problem. The group’s CEO Andrew Andrzejewski explains:

“Through our data analysis, we proved something taxpayers could easily intuit,” Andrzejewski told the DCNF. “Federal agencies follow GAO’s recommendations and scrap unnecessary spending far more thoroughly than Congress, which continues dragging its heels and only resolves fewer than half of the recommendations”

That is not a surprising finding, but it is nice to have it confirmed nonetheless, especially because of the success story that comes with it.

Andrew Andrzejewski unexpectedly passed away shortly after Open the Books published this report. He has left behind big shoes to fill as he was often the leading voice behind the group’s work to make government spending at all levels of government more transparent and to expose waste, fraud, and abuse wherever they found it. Open the Books continues to follow Andrzejewski’s mission.

• This article was published at The Beacon