Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Trashing Waste in Government Date: Mon, 26 Oct 92 11:27:05 EST Message-ID: \HD Trashing Waste in Government \BY Michael Rust \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: Politicians have had a lot to say lately about combating waste and abuse in federal spending, but how much of it is posturing? A lot, but efforts by groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste and some lawmakers genuinely committed to deficit reduction could turn the tide. TEXT: Some people may call it garbage, but to an artist of a certain temperament it's an objet trouve - a "found object" that can be used to create a beautiful piece of art. Politicians seeking reelection have a similar attitude toward government spending. They, too, can see the beauty in what others consider waste. This is seldom acknowleged publicly. Given a choice between deficit spending, higher taxes or cutting government waste, everyone - politician and citizen alike - easily chooses eliminating waste as the best route. Making good on that preference, however, isn't so easy. In 1981, during the heady days of Ronald Reagan's first term, he asked J. Peter Grace, chief executive officer of W. R. Grace & Co., to chair a commission on ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending. The President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, as the Grace Commission was formally known, turned in its 48-volume report in 1984, claiming to have identified potential three-year savings of $424 billion. Eight years later, both major party presidential candidates have paid lip service to the idea of cutting government waste. But the public perceives them as "falling short," says Tom Schatz, president of the Washington-based Citizens Against Government Waste, a private group cofounded by Grace and syndicated columnist Jack Anderson shortly after the report to promote the commission's recommendations. "There have been victories here and there," says Schatz, and "$250 billion has been saved [in eight years] as a result of Grace Commission recommendations, as of the end of fiscal year 1992. That's something, but clearly not enough." The federal government has become "a reelection organ," says Martin Gross, author of The Government Racket: Washington Waste from A to Z (Bantam). Gross had no trouble finding enough waste in the $1.5 trillion federal budget to fill his book, which has been high on paperback best-seller lists. A former reporter, editor and college professor, Gross says that both George Bush and Bill Clinton are trying to circumvent the waste issue by "damning it with faint praise." Both call for a reduction in waste, but are vague about how to go about it. "They're playing games with a massive subject. What they're trying to do is appease the growing anger of people," he says. While the effort to root out government waste may seem to have stalled, the growth of the national debt has not. With the specter of a $4 trillion national debt looming, efforts to cut government waste may take on a new urgency. Rallies were planned around the country for Taxpayer's Action Day on Oct. 17; the event is organized annually by Citizens Against Government Waste's sister lobbying organization, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste. "There are 200 rallies scheduled already. It's really been pretty astounding," says Schatz. Lawmakers have paid increased attention to his 450,000-member organization since the advent of Taxpayer's Action Day three years ago, he says. The annual ratings that Schatz's group compiles, ranking the members of Congress based on votes they cast on waste-related issues, also has caught their attention. This year, the ratings task has been made somewhat easier by "porkbuster" votes - attempts to force votes on individual pieces of pork barrel spending. (Often, the most egregious examples of waste are tacked on as amendments to large, unrelated bills.) Sen. Robert Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, says his porkbuster bill "identified over $1 billion in waste, some of it in my own state, and it got nowhere because people were afraid to take on the system. We're not helping anybody by bankrupting America." Schatz is more optimistic about the tactic of forcing votes on specific spending issues. Lawmakers such as Smith, Minnesota Democratic Rep. Tim Penny and Illinois Republican Rep. Harris Fawell have done "a real good job in getting them to the floor. There's more movement in the right direction," he says. Besides making lawmakers accountable, such votes help Schatz compile his rankings. And he believes that for wasteful spending to be brought under control, it must happen one small cut at a time. "I think that there's a lot more serious examination of entitlements, of programs that are obsolete or not essential or duplicative," says Schatz. "Agricultural field offices being one that's finally reaching the top of the list; things like a dollar coin, little things that eventually add up to a large amount of money that have been kicked around for awhile that seem to be getting more and more support." In a mean season of bouncing checks and bounced incumbents, the new Congress may offer a fresh opportunity to attack waste, Schatz believes. "When you've got well over 120 new members of Congress coming in - maybe even a third of the House coming in - fresh and new, without having ties to the special interests that have helped keep these programs going for all these years, there is real opportunity to get these things changed." Some feel that government waste is like pornography - it might be difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. Citizens Against Government Waste defines it as "the shortfall between what we should get with our tax dollars and what we actually get; as spending too much money for a given result; or as not enough result for a given amount of money." While Schatz concedes this "can certainly be a very broad definition," his organization and other opponents of waste have little difficulty tagging what they regard as misspent government money. Examples abound. A recent Schatz favorite is $200,000 for local weed research in New Mexico - "It's one of those things where some members of Congress must be smoking this stuff and obviously inhaling," he says. Another is Steamtown, a proposed $66 million railway museum in Scranton, Pa. The National Park Service has already spent $900,000 to identify and remove toxic materials and on deep-core drillings to determine the extent of toxic contamination in the rail yard. A former transportation curator of the Smithsonian Institution described the project to the General Accounting Office as "a third-rate collection in a place to which it has no relevance." Gross says that while researching his book, "I found $300 billion in waste and I got burned out. I could have found another $100 billion." The federal government's overhead expenses - some $280 billion annually for things such as office supplies and leases - were a rich source for him. "That's $130,000 per employee," he says, with $7 billion spent on travel alone. "It goes up automatically each year." Earlier this year, an effort by Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, to cut government overhead by 10 percent was defeated in the House. Gross thinks it could be cut in half. He also believes that former congressmen should be forbidden from becoming lobbyists and that no member of a congressional committee should be able to vote on extra money for his own district or the districts of fellow committee members. Above all, he supports a zero-based budget, where Congress has to start from scratch each session - "the biggest crime is that all the mistakes in government are accumulated and increased." Gross's book is filled with examples, both large and relatively small: * The White House maintains 29 limousines, and 50 government officials have door-to-door limo service at a cost of $100,000 apiece. * Together, the House and Senate provide employment for 12,000 staffers at a cost of $1.5 billion annually. * The White House staff has increased in 30 years from 375 to 1,250 - not including the people who supervise the budget - at a cost of $300 million over those 30 years. * Former presidents continue to be subsidized by taxpayers, as are the libraries the former chief executives build to commemorate themselves (with the exception of Richard Nixon's). The cost is $25 million a year and rising with every new ex-president. Ronald Reagan's office rent in Los Angeles is $345,000; Reagan and Gerald Ford are in a tie for the most travel expenses; and Jimmy Carter has spent the most on office overhead costs. * While New Yorkers pay about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, taxpayer-subsidized power from the Hoover Dam is sold to private utilities for a penny a kilowatt. * At a time of military downsizing, the Pentagon is adding a wing for several thousand new employees - at a cost of $112 million. * The cost of defaulted student loans this year was expected to reach $3.5 billion - a default rate of almost 30 percent. * Congress appropriated $19 million to study methane gas emissions from cow flatulence. While examples of government waste can stimulate momentary outrage, critics believe solutions lie deeper. Congressional reform "is very much near the top of our list of things to get rolling on early next year," says Schatz. He cites the failure of Congress to implement approved legislation mandating that professional financial officers be hired to oversee congressional spending. "This is not brain surgery," says Schatz. "There are [chief financial officers] out of work all over the country because of the recession. You need a competent, private sector, skilled chief financial officer to come in there and put the books in order for the U.S. Congress." Legislators have extended the hiring deadlines several times since July without picking anybody, he says. "It's just typical of how they extend lip service to reform and don't pursue it." He adds: "This was a really simple thing to do that would have shown at least some indication that they were interested in getting themselves under control. If they have failed to do one of the easiest things they could do to even give the public the perception that they were getting their house in order, it just adds to the public perception that they have no interest in getting things under control." Gross believes lawmakers suffer from the same disability that ordinary taxpayers do - they really don't understand how American government works. "Poor education" is the reason they fail to confront fiscal reality, he says. "Starting in grade school and going on to high government levels, they don't know how the government operates." Lawmakers see only their own relatively small turf that needs to be protected, without grasping the scope of the centralized bureaucracy that has been created, he says. "It's lack of accountability," says Schatz. "It's a lack of financial control, lack of good management skills, lack of oversight, and it's interest in reelection as much as anything." Pork spending on projects politically advantageous to the congressman is symbolic of this attitude, he says. On Capitol Hill, "they say it's only a couple of hundred thousand for my buddy here and I'll get a couple of million there" for projects that "are not competitive. And they are not subject to hearings, they are done behind closed doors and - if they ever saw light of day - would clearly not be approved by a majority of taxpayers, even a majority of members." Many lawmakers "are afraid to deal" with the spiraling debt problem, agrees New Hampshire's Smith. "I think frankly it's much easier to talk about the next election than it is the next generation." He also says Americans must "wise up and see what the people they've elected are doing." Schatz's group and Gross both support some of the same reforms, such as term limits, reducing the number of congressional committees and enacting a presidential line-item veto. Schatz says committee assignments should be rotated "so you don't have somebody like [Rep.] Jamie Whitten, who's been in the same position for 50 years and still thinks it's 1942," referring to the Mississippi Democrat who has been chairman of the House Appropriations Committee since 1979. Past efforts to control spending have been less than successful. "We haven't been doing anything," says Smith of New Hampshire. "Congress is the most guilty of that. They've talked about it and done nothing." After passing the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law, lawmakers "walked away from it because we didn't have the courage to pull the hammer down." A recent proposal introduced by Smith in the Senate and Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania in the House attempts to remedy this. Both proposed a checkoff on federal income tax forms enabling taxpayers to devote up to 10 percent of their taxes to paying off the national debt. The checkoffs would trigger automatic, across-the-board spending cuts, with Social Security and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. exempted. "This one creates the challenge that politicians most fear, and that is a confrontation between them and the people," says Walker. Gramm-Rudman was essentially a contract among members of Congress that "we would do the right thing about reducing the deficit," but instead of meeting the terms of the contract, lawmakers "just extended the time to comply." A balanced budget amendment would be the same sort of contract, and members of Congress could take appropriations items off budget to avoid meeting this standard, he says. With the 10 percent checkoff, taxpayers would have "an opportunity to specify a certain level of spending cuts to be made." Critics have said the proposal would give the wealthy more power in determining federal spending. Walker argues that while people who pay more tax would be able to specify larger spending cuts, they would have no say in where those cuts would come. Says Smith: "Taxpayers specifically determine how much is to be cut, and then they simply tell the Congress,'You cut it - that's why we elected you.' " Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget say the concept would work - in fact, in the unlikely event of maximum participation, the budget would be balanced in five years, says Walker. However, the bill went nowhere after assuming a partisan hue in this election year. So far, it's "clearly an initiative that Republicans support and Democrats oppose," says Smith, whose Senate version was defeated 36-58 on Sept. 25. Walker's House bill didn't even make it to the floor. The measure, which was supported by Citizens Against Government Waste, will be offered again next year. Without some sort of action, "we're talking $6 trillion of national debt" in 10 years, says Walker. By that point, "every dime that will be paid by people in income tax will be going to do nothing but pay interest on the debt." If Congress continues down "the debt spiral . . . there's not going to be a program for anything - we're going to be broke," says Smith. "We're going to default on all of our debts, default on our savings bonds, default on our foreign debt, and become a debtor nation." Gross says a "sweep" is needed. "It's not Clinton or Bush - it's not a question of individuals. Rather, it's a change in attitude" that's required. If nothing is done, "we will have something resembling a revolution," says Gross. "My book is a best-seller not because [readers] like my face, but because they're angry." His only reassuring thought: "It will be a nonviolent, peaceful revolution. A peaceful, but angry, revolution." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM