Government Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Floor Speech
Mr. Speaker, one of the things I hear from my constituents so regularly is: What are you doing about our Nation's debt? What are you doing about this out-of-control budget?
From time to time, at our committee, we would hold hearings on an inspector general report and actually look at some waste. This started our office thinking and some of us on the Budget Committee thinking about: How do you begin to quantify that and hold these agencies accountable?
As one of my constituents said: You know, it seems that they are always after one of us, a small-business owner, but they never go ask a Federal bureaucrat or a Federal agency to pony up or to pay back money or to be held accountable.
In our office, our interns this summer have worked with us on a project to actually begin to quantify this waste and to look at these inspector general reports.
Mr. Speaker, this is what we found. Just taking the reports from the 70 agencies that have inspector generals and looking at a 4-year period of time, from 2011 to 2014, what we found is this: we could put our finger on $105.7 billion of waste, and that is $105.7 billion of waste, of taxpayer money that is being wasted. It has been identified by the inspector general's office. That works out to about $1.5 billion for each of these 70 agencies.
Now, what was of concern to us was the fact that many of these agencies are doing nothing about it; and we found that, when you look at the reports that have been issued, which total 81 different reports, the reports for which a management decision was made during the reporting period was only 30 of those reports.
Mr. Speaker, 30 times, management said that they are going to go in and they are going to take an action in response to the recommendations that the inspector general has found.
Now, one of the things that we looked at was where these wasteful occurrences continue to happen and who are the repeat offenders when you look at these IG reports.
Let me give you some examples, Mr. Speaker. Department of Defense, $38.2 billion that has been identified--this is one of the reasons that Republicans are pushing to audit the DOD and hold people accountable for the wasteful spending.
Health and Human Services, $10.3 billion--we found that $2 billion went toward the ObamaCare Web site, which still is barely working.
Department of Agriculture, $9.2 billion; Social Security Administration, $9.1 billion; Department of Energy, $7.7 billion--and by the way, Solyndra, a green energy firm, filed for bankruptcy in September 2011, after they got 536 million taxpayer dollars. The list goes on and on.
What we are going to do--and I commend Chairman Price for pushing forward to hold some hearings with these inspector generals, with these departments, to drill down on the total number of reports and to hold them accountable for not taking an action and looking for ways that we, as Members of Congress, can charge back these agencies for the continued misuse--not occasional misuse, not one time misuse, but continued misuse of taxpayer dollars.
When you look at the list of these agencies and what they have done, year after year, there are some of these agencies that end up in the top 10 offenders every year--2014, Department of Defense, HUD, Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, Social Security, Department of Agriculture, VA, Homeland Security, Department of Education, Department of State, and the Agency for International Development.
You can look at 2013, continuing down the list, the top 10 again, Defense, HUD, Energy, Health and Human Services, Railroad Retirement Board, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Social Security Administration, Department of Education, and Department of State--repeated waste, fraud, and abuse of the taxpayer money.
When I came to Congress in January 2003, our freshman class decided our project was going to be rooting out wasteful Washington spending. We continue to be committed to that, and I submit our findings to the body for their review and understanding.
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