GETTING OFF THE LIST

The great thing about opposing government waste, fraud and abuse is that everyone already agrees with you: those leery of government feel vindicated in their suspicion and those enamored of it want government unburdened by incompetence. But there is a huge

difference between opposing nebulous, systemic shortcomings in agency programs and actually digging into those programs to find the specific points of failure, determine their cause and take steps to solve them.

The General Accounting Office has for 12 years has pointed out high-risk programs – those vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement. That has been sufficient for many agencies to correct their problems – which may be in how money is tracked or how computer systems interact – and get off the list. But seven programs have been labeled high risk every time since 1990 and another six have stayed on the list since ’95, suggesting that merely pointing out these vulnerabilities is not sufficient. The 23 high-risk programs on the latest GAO list equals billions of dollars of waste in a time of deficit spending by the federal government.

Sen. Susan Collins and Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, chairmen respectively of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, said Thursday that they intend to examine the most intractable of these problems, identifying what must be done to make these programs more effective and to better protect tax dollars. These would include the seven that have become permanent features of the GAO’s risk list: NASA’s contract management, student financial aid, Department of Energy’s contract management, Defense’s weapons-systems acquisition and its inventory management, collection of unpaid taxes and Medicare.

Clearly, these are major portions of government and even breaking the programs into smaller parts, as GAO reports do with, for instance, Medicare and a subset, its reimbursement system, does not begin to adequately define the problem, must less solve it.

By highlighting the latest GAO survey, Sen. Collins and Rep. Davis are establishing agendas for their committees. They are not just lamenting the results of the survey. They are committing themselves to reducing it. Their work will be reflected in the GAO list two and four years from now. Success will be measured in the number of agencies no longer on the list and the billions of dollars saved annually.