Newsletter: Making the Governemnt Work Smart

Statement

Dear Friend,

Washington has piled a mountain of debt on our children and grandchildren during the spending binge of the last several years. It's absolutely critical that we use every tool at our disposal to end the out-of-control spending and borrowing. Too many agencies, including the VA, do not provide effective or efficient services and continually waste taxpayer's dollars. The announcement that over 57,000 veterans are currently waiting for their first appointment at the VA is appalling. This problem is systemic and shines light on a larger, more pervasive problem in the federal government: It wastes too much.

The vast scope of the federal government creates plenty of opportunities for waste, fraud and duplication to gum up the works and make government less efficient and more costly. Sprawling federal bureaucracies with budgets that only seem to grow year after year make it increasingly difficult for taxpayers to even gain an understanding of just how much of their hard-earned money is wasted every year. We must do everything we can to make sure every single tax dollar is spent wisely.

That's why I've introduced legislation that would cut waste in every sector of the federal government and bring light into some of the darkest corners of the bureaucratic maze, HR. 5064, The Lean and Responsive Government Act

When veterans wait an unnecessarily long time to see a doctor, when agencies waste their time, they very well may be taking the only time the veteran has left. That time is precious to anyone who wants to see their loved ones or just enjoy a life they have fought hard for.

A coordinated and innovative approach to improve process speed, reduce waste, and incorporate data-driven analysis could save hundreds of billions of tax dollars and drastically improve government services, and that's exactly what my Lean and Responsive Government Act would do.

Politicians have promised to cut waste for decades, but those pledges have almost always amounted to little more than lip service. However, my legislation is different, and here is why:

This legislation centers around continuous process improvement methods that reduce waste and improve effectiveness. The goals of a continuous process improvement operation are to drastically reduce defects, mistakes, and variation. Agencies will put taxpayers first and constantly use data to evaluate its results.

The process already proves successful in the government entities that use it, including NASA and State governments. The Lean and Responsive Government Act requires the chief operating officer of every federal agency to implement these continuous process improvement techniques and include information on their efforts in an annual report to Congress.

Unlike any successful company or business, the federal government does not operate under an overarching strategic plan. Instead, the government operates under hundreds of individual operating plans for each agency. The result is a vast and chaotic alphabet soup of agencies and programs that often duplicate services and sometimes compete with one another. The Lean and Responsive Government Act would provide the federal government with a unified and consistent method for reducing the duplication and wasted resources.

We can save massive sums of money by cutting waste and making government services more efficient. Waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication gobble up hundreds of billions of tax dollars every year and can cause taxpayers to wait for services that may be life saving.

On one hand, we have a federal government that is piling up debt faster than at any point in our history and is so inefficient that veterans may die while waiting for care or trying to navigate the bureaucracy.

On the other hand, the federal government wastes hundreds of billions of dollars every year through inefficiency and mismanagement that has destroyed American's faith in the federal government. We simply can't afford to lose so many tax dollars to waste.

American taxpayers don't have an unlimited amount of time or money and neither does the federal government. That's why I've introduced the Lean and Responsive Government Act. With these innovative processes, we can significantly reduce wasted money and services, and reign in the new "fourth branch of government": the sprawling federal bureaucracy.

Source