So many federal agencies are duplicating one another's efforts in so many different areas that the billions lost to such wasteful government spending is impossible to calculate.
A recent report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office uncovered 162 areas of duplicate spending, which at minimum wastes tens of billions of dollars every year.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, a well-known hawk on wasteful government spending, estimates that the duplication cited in the GAO report squanders between $100 billion and $200 billion a year.
Coburn lambasted Congress for allowing such waste to go on despite a budget crisis and, most recently, a budget sequester that has forced $85 billion in cuts to many vital services.
"Instead of preventing furloughs, reopening air traffic control towers and restoring public access to the White House, Congress and the [Obama] administration continue to defend billions of dollars in duplicative programs," Coburn, who wrote the amendment that requires the GAO reports, said in a statement.
The sort of duplicative spending described in the GAO report is in addition to the $18 billion in wasteful government spending Coburn spotlights in his annual "Wastebook."
Most of the "Wastebook" programs shouldn't exist at all. The programs in the GAO report, on the other hand, are mostly legitimate. We just don't need two, three or 100 different versions of the same thing.
For example, the GAO found:
"While millions of Americans have been doing more with less, the federal government continues to do less with more," Coburn said.
Some duplicated wasteful government spending occurs because one hand doesn't know what the other is doing - not surprising, given the monstrous size of the federal bureaucracy.
"The government agencies don't exchange information about their funded programs. There's no centralized place where all this stuff could be managed and searched and discovered," Virginia Tech professor Harold "Skip" Garner, who did a study on duplicative federal grants, told USA Today.
But a lot of wasteful government spending of all kinds happens because individual members of Congress take pains to protect any spending that occurs in their district.
"The challenge here is that one man's trash is another man's treasure," Ron Bonjean of Singer Bonjean Strategies told CNN Money. "While some of [the spending] may sound or look ridiculous, there's always a member of Congress defending it."
So while the GAO report's numerous recommendations on how to reduce duplicate spending to save money have widespread support from congressional Republicans, Democrats and the Obama administration, don't expect much to change.
"The Obama administration promised to root out redundant programs in the president's budget, but don't count on it," Steven Greenhut, vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, told The Daily Mail. "The government is wasteful, regardless of what president is in office. The real problem is the federal government continues to grow well beyond what is healthy for its citizens."
For more outlandish uses of government money, check out this report: This Year's Most Outrageous Examples of Wasteful Government Spending
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About the Author
David Zeiler, Associate Editor for Money Morning at Money Map Press, has been a journalist for more than 35 years, including 18 spent at The Baltimore Sun. He has worked as a writer, editor, and page designer at different times in his career. He's interviewed a number of well-known personalities - ranging from punk rock icon Joey Ramone to Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Over the course of his journalistic career, Dave has covered many diverse subjects. Since arriving at Money Morning in 2011, he has focused primarily on technology. He's an expert on both Apple and cryptocurrencies. He started writing about Apple for The Sun in the mid-1990s, and had an Apple blog on The Sun's web site from 2007-2009. Dave's been writing about Bitcoin since 2011 - long before most people had even heard of it. He even mined it for a short time.
Dave has a BA in English and Mass Communications from Loyola University Maryland.