Washington, D.C. - Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today commended U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige for overseeing his agency’s recent efforts to recover $450 million lost under the previous administration in waste, fraud, and abuse.  So far the project has recovered $350 million, with the remaining $100 million still being pursued. 

“Secretary Paige is a role model for all cabinet secretaries for treating public dollars with the respect they deserve,” CAGW President Tom Schatz said.  “Instead of simply throwing good money after bad, he has used common-sense strategies to pursue and reclaim lost resources.  His effort should be imitated throughout government, particularly at large agencies, like the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly HCFA), that regularly make tens of billions of dollars in improper payments with few reclamation efforts.”

In a report last year, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee uncovered more than $19 billion in improper payments at a handful of agencies.  There are believed to be billions more in other agencies that were unable to perform the self-audits necessary to estimate their loss.

“The problem with which Secretary Paige is struggling, and this goes for most federal programs and departments, is that the most elementary mechanisms for accounting, managing money, and tracking performance simply do not work,” Schatz added.  “That is why CAGW continues to recommend a private sector commission to audit the entire government and root out waste, fraud, and abuse.”

CAGW’s Prime Cuts 2000 publication highlighted expenditures worth $1.2 trillion over five years that could be eliminated.

“While CAGW applauds Secretary Paige’s recovery process here, we also know this is the tip of the iceberg,” Schatz also said.  “For example, within a few agencies — not only the Education Department, but the Departments of Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development — there are literally scores of programs dealing with literacy and at-risk-youth that are duplicative, ineffective, and unaccountable.  Paige should work to audit his entire agency like a business, consolidating, demanding accountability, and cutting without hesitation into the many areas of unneeded expenditure.”     

“If he succeeds, he will not only be remembered as one who helped clean up the mess in Washington, but as a genuine friend of the taxpayer and public servant who helped restore the peoples’ confidence in government,” Schatz concluded.

CAGW is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government.