Did you know there are 50 federal homeless assistance programs administered by eight different agencies? And 70 substance-abuse prevention programs for youth controlled by 13 agencies? And 90 early childhood programs scattered among 11 agencies and 20 offices? That means some agencies administer two separate programs that do the same thing.
How can this be? It’s like that old saying, “If you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” If you’re Congress, every problem looks as if it needs a new, specially crafted program to address it.
Teacher training efforts not living up to expectations? Let’s not ditch the one we have and start another. Let’s just add one, then another, till we have 86 such programs spread over nine agencies. And 40 job training programs. And 17 programs, spread over eight agencies, that deal with rural water and wastewater.
Last week, on the House floor, we took what I consider a small — but significant — step on the road back to fiscal sanity. I introduced a motion to require inspectors general to report yearly to Congress and the president on wasteful or redundant programs in their agencies and propose legislation to eliminate or consolidate them.
The idea is to get the officials who know their agencies best and are best positioned to call the balls and strikes to help us identify overlap and duplication, abolish agencies or programs that no longer serve an important government purpose, or identify programs whose discretionary budgets could be reduced with all savings going to deficit reduction. Despite protests from the Democratic leadership, my motion passed, 274 to 144, and, significantly, attracted 80 Democratic votes.
Contrary to what you read in the newspapers, we’re not stupid here, and we sincerely try not to be wasteful. We do have a bad habit, though, of haphazardly establishing programs to address short-term problems — only to see those programs live forever. It gets old reading that our approval rating in Congress is 14 percent, knowing that a lot of the public’s frustration stems from redundancy in federal programs.
This problem is not new. In 2003, Paul Volcker, Donna Shalala and Frank Carlucci testified before the House Committee on Government Reform, which I chaired then, about a report they had released on behalf of the National Commission on Public Service. The report concluded: “Ad hoc layering of agencies, departments and programs greatly complicated management, expanded the influence of powerful interests and diminished coherent policy direction. The federal government today is a layered jumble of organizations with muddled public missions.”
In all, we conducted eight hearings on this subject when I was chairman. Our hearings covered everything from child welfare programs to intelligence operations to federal food safety oversight. Cheese pizzas go to one agency; pepperoni to another.
I tried several times to address the problem through legislation, but met turf-related resistance from Democrats and Republicans alike.
This amendment won’t end overlap and duplication in the federal government. It won’t balance the budget or bring peace in our time. But hopefully, if we see a list every year of programs that can and should be eliminated or downsized, it will urge us to think about what we’re voting for and try to return to a day when we’re paying for, say, only 10 homeless programs.
And 10 ought to be enough for anyone.
Rep. Tom Davis, R, who represents Virginia’s 11th District, is serving his seventh term in the U.S. House of Representatives.
