Elizabeth Harrington highlights for Washington Free Beacon readers a new report recommending ways the federal government could make major reductions in taxpayer spending with no negative impact on services.
Eliminating duplicative federal programs and inefficiencies could save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a new report released by the Government Accountability Office.
The federal watchdog’s 2016 annual report identified nearly 100 actions Congress or the executive branch could take to make government run more efficiently, including eliminating $1.3 billion in disability insurance overpayments and more than $100 billion in savings from the Pentagon by sharing how much excess ammunition it has with other agencies rather than destroying it.
“The federal government continues to face an unsustainable long-term fiscal path based on the imbalance between federal revenue and spending, primarily driven by changing demographics and rising health care costs,” the GAO said. “Addressing this imbalance will require long-term changes to both spending and revenue and difficult fiscal policy decisions. Significant action to mitigate this imbalance must be taken soon to minimize the disruption to individuals and the economy.”
Among the report’s findings included $388 million that could have been saved between 2013 and 2015 by consolidating federal government cell phone contracts. In a GAO report last year, only five of the 15 agencies it reviewed knew how many cell phones and plans it had.
The GAO found “risk of duplicative federal spending” on health insurance coverage through the Obamacare exchanges and opportunities for savings within the complex financial regulatory structure. The GAO provided a flow chart that looks more like a tangled web of the 15 different federal regulators in charge of market oversight and the various ways they overlap.
