WHY DO WE NEED THIS?
The waste that permeates every level of our federal government has to stop. We know that putting this genie back in the bottle seems overwhelming — if not impossible — but it can absolutely be done!
Operation Overhaul reduces costs, maximizes value and improves performance by strengthening operational strategies, building an effective organizational structure and demanding accountability. The policy removes redundancy, unlocks hidden value by eliminating waste, establishes clear channels of reporting and responsibility and gets the most out of government employees.
Operation Overhaul brings private sector principles into government in order to transform the current bureaucratic mentality. Historically, entrepreneurship and government have been viewed as mutually exclusive, mainly because they have been. However, there is absolutely nothing that prevents us from bringing an entrepreneurial spirit into government. It would be enormously helpful if government would embrace bold innovation, strategic vision and tenacious problem-solving techniques.
The hallmark of Operation Overhaul is that it demands tough but fair accountability. After the departments and programs are streamlined, strict review processes will keep them on track. Every program and agency will be continually evaluated and measured.
Plus, the federal departments must make a strong case for their value every single year. Departments must prove that they narrowly define their challenges, conduct in-depth due diligence, formulate smart and timely plans of action, assess the risks and develop responsible budgets.
To facilitate this process, a non-connected Efficiency Review Board will oversee the federal departments, acting as a new line of financial defense. Currently, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) receives each department’s yearly budget request, communicates with them about the requests and makes budget recommendations before the president’s budget is sent to Congress. The new Efficiency Review Board will assess each department’s programs and approve their budgets before they are presented to the OMB.
Waste. The word that comes to mind over and over when we think of our governmental policies is waste. Billions after billions are just wasted. Seriously wasted. Like just flush-it-down-the-toilet wasted.
Why does this happen? Because our government has become a bureaucratic Behemoth monster that will eventually strangle our ability to advance on any level. This is not a Republican-esque rant about the size of government, because theirs is a misguided argument. Contrary to their belief, size does not necessarily correlate to efficiency. Just because the federal government is smaller doesn’t mean it will automatically run more effectively. Some of the largest of companies run like a well-oiled machine while some of the smallest of companies are management disasters.
It’s not about size. It’s about efficiency. If we focus on being efficient, our government will be exactly the size it needs to be.
Walmart tops the Fortune 500 list with $573 billion in annual revenue, and Amazon is second with $470 billion. Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government collected $4.4 trillion in revenue in FY2023.
The portion of that figure squandered is off the chain. From the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — which is on track to cost American taxpayers over $1 trillion over its 60-year life span, leading Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) to call it a “rathole” — to things like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) having to pay taxpayers $3 billion in interest because refunds were late — waste permeates our federal government.
And those type of things are just the tip of the iceberg. For example, the rampant fraud, waste, and abuse within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is staggering. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) — a government agency that provides auditing, evaluation, and investigative services for the U.S. Congress — says that:
“CMS, which administers Medicare, faces many challenges related to implementing payment methods that encourage efficient service delivery, managing the program to serve beneficiaries well, and safeguarding the program from loss due to fraud, waste, and abuse. Medicare has been designated as a High Risk program because its complexity and susceptibility to improper payments, in addition to its size, have led to serious management challenges. Addressing these challenges requires improvements to payment methods, program management, and program safeguards.”
A follow-up report from the GAO revealed that:
“Improper payment estimates for fiscal year 2019 totaled about $175 billion, based on improper payment estimates reported by federal programs, an increase from the fiscal year 2018 total of $151 billion. Of the $175 billion, about $121 billion (approximately 69 percent) was concentrated in three program areas: (1) Medicaid, (2) Medicare, and (3) Earned Income Tax Credit. Improper payments — payments that should not have been made or that were made in incorrect amounts — continue to be an area of fiscal concern in the federal government. Improper payments have been estimated to total almost $1.7 trillion government-wide from fiscal years 2003 through 2019.”
SAY WHAT? 1.7 TRILLION DOLLARS? Is this a joke? And the Chinese and Japanese governments say, “Thank you, America!”
Most recently, the U.S. Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against insurers Kaiser Permanente, Elevance Health, Humana and UnitedHealth Group (CVS Health/Aetna is still under investigation) for allegedly exploiting the Medicare Advantage program by submitting invoices to Medicare that fraudulently over-diagnosed their policyholders with serious diseases (Medicare Advantage pays insurers more for sicker patients). Depending on who you listen to, these extra diagnoses cost the American taxpayer between $12-25 billion dollars.
Unfortunately, this is not a one-off. It’s actually the modus operandi for practically every single department of our federal government, and it’s been happening for decades. Let’s look to FY2012 for another example. We realize this is a few years back, but it’s one of the craziest examples and we all know it hasn’t gotten any better. If anything, it’s gotten much worse.
In FY2012, there were at least 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans, for a combined cost of $799 billion to the American taxpayer. This included 28 education and job-training programs ($94.4 billion), 17 different food-aid programs ($105 billion), and over 22 various housing programs ($49.6 billion). There were seven federal agencies involved in “Education and Job Training” and seven involved in the category called “Social Services.”
There are many glaring issues in that last paragraph, but the most obvious one is that this process is incredibly inefficient. Inefficient is not even the right word — we need an entirely new word for what this is.
Seven separate federal agencies that administer 28 different employment and training programs, with practically zero coordination between them? This is beyond absurd. It is imperative that we reorganize this mess and use our resources more effectively. The overlap alone is wasting so, so, so much money.
It’s this lack of coordination that leads to things like this: A 2019 report called Asleep at the Wheel, published by the nonprofit group Network for Public Education, did a deep dive into the federal Charter School Program (CSP), which began in 1994 under the U.S. Department of Education. Read the report here.
The report revealed that over 1,000 grants had been given to charter schools that were forced to close due to mismanagement, poor performance, or fraud, or charters that never formally opened at all. These wasted grants equaled roughly $1 billion. The report also says that the U.S. Department of Education does not verify the information on charter school applications, nor appropriately monitor even the valid grants.
Worse, the report found “troubling examples of charter management organizations (CMO’s) that received massive grants that engaged in practices that push-out low-performing students, violate the rights of students with disabilities and cull their student bodies through policies, programs and requests for parental donations.”
The conclusion of the analysis was that the “U.S. Department of Education has not been a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars in its management of the Charter School Program.” Ya think?
Audit reports released by the U.S. Department of Education in September 2022 seem to back these assertions up. For one, the audit found that charter school networks and other management organizations funded by the federal government did not open as many charter schools as they had committed to… by around FIFTY percent. The audit also uncovered significant inaccurate and incomplete record keeping.