The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform highlighted wasteful federal spending on Thursday, holding a hearing that cited numerous examples of the practice, but few successes in eliminating it.
The hearing led with testimony from Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Carper (D., Del.) and Ranking Member Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), whoserecent release of the 2013 Wastebook identified over $30 billion in frivolous government spending.
Coburn said the problem of government waste is not caused by a lack of bipartisanship in Washington.
“My take is we get along too well,” he said. “We have presidents that come and go, Congresses who come and go, and we still have government waste. Why is that?”
“The problem isn’t that we don’t know what the problem is,” Coburn said, “it’s that we don’t act on the problem.”
The hearing exposed a lengthy list of examples, including $9 billion in tax breaks and loans to the wealthy that saw farm subsidies going to Ted Turner, Jon Bon Jovi, and former NBA player Scottie Pippen.
Thomas Schatz, the president of Citizens Against Government Waste, testified to the numerous overlap in federal programs. “Analysis is virtually non-existent” for the 47 job training programs across nine agencies, he said, which cost $18 billion in fiscal year 2009.
Thirteen agencies administered 209 science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs totaling $3.1 billion in FY 2010, though the United States still lags behind other countries in the STEM field.
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