Most Americans can't afford to waste their hard-earned money on expensive things they don't need. But their representatives in Congress have made a habit of doing just that with taxpayer money - to the tune of $30 billion in the last year alone. Among other things, they blew $1 million on a high-tech bus stop in Virginia and $415,000 to train "wine educators" in China.
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.
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