One rule has saved Americans billions in unnecessary government spending

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

Former Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn amended the Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 to they require the GAO to include an investigation into duplicate spending among government entities in its annual report, which has saved the government $667.5 billion since its first report in 2011; seconds to open the books. Congress, however, had made efforts to stifle the GAO's mission, threatening to cut its funding right after its first report, and has been the slowest to adopt the GAO's waste-cutting recommendations.

“The federal government spends so much money that literally no one can tell the taxpayers the number of different programs that exist in the executive branch,” Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of Open the Books, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It is thanks to the persistence of the late Senator Tom Coburn that Congress is forced to do something to eliminate duplication and wasteful spending. If it weren't for the Coburn Rule, Congress would be happy to keep kicking money out the door , each committee functioning as its own fief making spending decisions in a vacuum.”

Federal agencies resolved 75 percent of the GAO's 2,018 recommendations, while Congress has resolved only 46 percent of the office's 140 recommendations, according to the report. As of today, 549 recommendations remain open and have not been fully addressed.

“Despite the best efforts of some lawmakers, they have been hamstrung by keeping the Coburn rule in place and allowing the GAO to continue highlighting waste, a victory for taxpayers that has persisted for more than a decade and netted hundreds of thousands of millions of savings”. Andrzejewski told the DCNF.

The Defense Department has been the most wasteful agency since 2011, with 99 open cost-cutting recommendations and 68 of them not fully addressed, according to Open the Books. However, government-wide defense spending saved the most implementation of GAO recommendations since 2011, with savings of $197 billion as of March.

According to the report, the Department of Health and Human Services is the second most wasteful, with 40 unaddressed and 17 partially addressed GAO recommendations. Health care spending followed a similar pattern to defense spending, saving the second most of the GAO's recommendations with $159 billion saved in March.

According to the report, the Department of Agriculture has not addressed any of its 12 open recommendations. The government has saved $45 billion by implementing GAO recommendations for the agricultural mission area.

Andrzejewski says agencies have generally been better at implementing GAO advice than Congress.

“Through our data analysis, we demonstrated something that taxpayers could easily intuit,” Andrzejewski told the DCNF. “Federal agencies follow GAO's recommendations and eliminate unnecessary spending much more thoroughly than Congress, which continues to drag its heels and address only less than half of the recommendations.”

In 2014, Coburn introduced the Let Me Google That For You Act, which sought to eliminate the outdated National Technical Information Service, a program that was losing $1 million a year by charging money for government reports that were freely available online , according to the report. The bill never passed, but the agency eventually did reused three years later, in 2017.

Most of the recommendations made by the GAO concerned “improvements in public safety and security, which accounted for 37 percent of the total, according to the report. The next largest topic area was “business process and management,” which were 23% of GAO recommendations.

The GAO was created by the Budget and Accounts Act of 1921 as a reaction to financial mismanagement during World War I, seconds on the GAO website. The act also required executive input to set the government's budget for the year, with the GAO formed as an independent part of the executive branch to oversee spending.

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