American taxpayers are forking over $1.7 billion a year just to maintain empty federal buildings.
Each year, 12 agencies run 20 programs to study invasive species, to the tune of $1.4 billion a year.
Leaders of the Government Transformation Initiative Coalition, teaming up with members of Congress, want to change that.
They’re behind the Government Transformation Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., in the House and soon to drop in the Senate, creating a commission to combine or eliminate redundant and wasteful federal programs and agencies.
“We have to honor the American people,” Steve Goodrich, CEO at the Center for Organizational Excellence and one of the coalition’s leaders, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The coalition has some experience in fiscal scrutiny, with other leadership members including David Walker, a former Government Accountability Office head, and Barry Melancon, president at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
But the trick, of course, as with anything in Washington, is making a massive overhaul of the federal government a reality. Ever so often, a new group says it has plans to fundamentally transform the way Washington works, but change comes incrementally, if at all.
In 2010 for example, President Barack Obama created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, aka the Simpson-Bowles Commission, to shore up the United States’ fiscal future. But, that committee’s members couldn’t reach marshal enough internal support to report its findings to Congress. Fiscal reform supporters applauded the commission’s work, but it went basically nowhere.
Last year, CTI worked on similar legislation, and it failed to gain Congress’ approval. Supporters say this attempt could be different.
The bill requires Congress to take an up-or-down vote on any recommendations-turned legislation from the commission within three days. That would “force the hand of Congress,” as Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, put it.
