Time to Overhaul Washington's Agencies and Programs

When will Congress stop legislating new federal programs such as Obamacare and focus on overhauling the messes of the existing ones? It might go a long way to reinstating public trust in government and Congress.

Latest case of government waste from Veronique de Rugy:

I explained earlier in the week that the federal government makes around $100 billion a year in improper welfare payments — a large portion of which is fraud in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a program administered by the IRS. Almost a quarter of the EITC’s cost in 2012 – $12.6 billion — was due to improper payments, making it the worst of the programs examined.

A 2013 report on the issue from a Treasury Department inspector general has some pretty striking numbers about the scale of the problem. According to their data, between 2003 and 2012, the amount of improper payments for the EITC alone is over $100 billion – somewhere between $110.8 billion and $132.6 billion.

The EITC is a single program by one government agency. Multiply its waste, fraud and abuse by all programs of all the alphabet soup of government agencies — IRS, NSA, EPA, DOE, FBI, FCC, FEMA, SSA, etc — and it's easy to see how out-of-control government bureaucracies are driving the largest national debt in history and increasingly depriving citizens of liberty, property and privacy.


An October 2013 Gallup poll on the public's attitude toward government found that only "19% say that they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time" (graphic above). In the same poll, 23% had a favorable opinion of Congress, while 73% had an unfavorable view. 

Congress has oversight of agencies, their programs and their funding. Logic suggests that both political parties would benefit from overhauling government agencies and programs: the Democratic Party to prove its claim that the federal government can be streamlined and improved to the benefit of citizens; the Republican Party to prove its claim that the federal government can be limited while providing essential services to citizens.