(Washington, D.C.) – Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), the nation’s premier taxpayer watchdog group, issued a statement criticizing President Obama’s executive order to establish an oversight and accountability board aimed at reducing waste, fraud, and abuse in government.  The order, titled “Delivering an Efficient, Effective, and Accountable Government,” establishes a Government Accountability and Transparency Board consisting of 11 “agency Inspectors General, agency Chief Financial Officers or Deputy Secretaries, a senior official of OMB, and such other members as the President shall designate.”  In addition, it stipulates that the sitting Chief Operating Officer of each federal agency be designated as the Senior Accountable Official responsible for eliminating wasteful programs, and calls for the President’s Chief Performance Officer (Performance Czar) to “work with agencies to ensure that each area identified as critical to performance … [is] frequently analyzed and reviewed by agency leadership.”

CAGW President Tom Schatz said, “Today’s announcement of a new initiative to finally root out waste, fraud, and abuse in government is at least the fifth such initiative undertaken by the Obama administration since 2009.  Like the others before it, this proposal includes nothing along the lines of tangible spending cuts or concrete suggestions for cutting government bloat.  In fact, President’s plan adds to the problem by creating yet another advisory board to identify waste.  The premise of the plan is dubious and the authority of the new board to eliminate redundancies when they are encountered is limited.  In creating new programs and relabeling existing positions, it is a caricature of the very culture that drives wasteful spending in the first place.

“If the President truly wants to eliminate duplicative, wasteful spending, he should start with the Government Accountability Office’s report from March, 2011 that identified 34 agencies, offices, and initiatives that provide similar or identical services to the same populations, along with 47 programs that are either wasteful or inefficient.  The list included 18 nutrition and food assistance programs, 47 job retraining programs, 80 economic development programs, 56 financial literacy programs, and $77 billion of waste at the Department of Defense.  Further, CAGW has just released its 2011 Prime Cuts database, which features 691waste-cutting recommendations that would save taxpayers $391.9 billion in the first year and $1.8 trillion over five years. 

Until his administration focuses on plausible cuts worth billions in taxpayer savings, ‘advisory boards,’ ‘accountable government initiatives,’ and ‘anti-waste’ memoranda should be treated as fluff, not action,” added Schatz.  “Taxpayers would benefit much more from the President petitioning Congress to eliminate wasteful programs – and from his fellow Democrats submitting a budget for the first time since 2009 – rather than thwarting every effort to cut spending,” Schatz concluded.

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse in government.