General Waste

According to a June 2012 Gallup poll, 79 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job. Perhaps this is because legislation passed by members of Congress is all too often a reflection of their parochial rather than overarching national interests. What this means for taxpayers is that instead of focusing on job creation, deficit reduction, and turning the economy around, Congress is wasting its resources on inconsequential measures, such as commemorative resolutions.

Bureaucratic, command-and-control regulation of coastal fisheries wastes taxpayers’ dollars and endangers the sustainability of this common resource. Managing a shared resource like fish in the sea is a difficult problem. Since no one owns them, there has always been simply a race to capture as many as you can and bring them to market. Ownership […]

A culture of inefficient government spending is endemic in Washington, D.C. However, such behavior is particularly frustrating for taxpayers when the rare example of spending less money produces an unsatisfactory outcome. This is unfortunately how the funding structure for Senate office expenses is designed. Due to a perverse system of incentives, senators who do not […]

In 2009, the state of West Virginia was granted $126,323,296 instimulus funding for the “West Virginia Statewide Broadband Infrastructure Project” to increase broadband access in public facilities including schools, libraries, and hospitals in what the grant defined as “vastly underserved areas.” Of this funding, $24 million was used to purchase 1,064 powerful Internet routers capable […]

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg believes that the local government should crack down to help those with a coke addiction…but he’s not talking about drug addicts. On May 31, 2012, Mayor Bloomberg proposed banning the sale of large-sized sodas, sports drinks, sweetened tea or coffee, and other sugary beverages as an antidote to the rising obesity problem. Bloomberg noted that more than half of NYC adults (58 percent) are overweight or obese.

In this critical election year, Americans will not only cast their votes for elected officials at all levels of government including President of the United States; they will also decide on several state ballot initiatives. Some of these votes will be cast long before November 6. Californians, in particular, will have an expensive and wasteful […]

Duplication within federal government agencies and programs is a long-standing issue. Redundancies within agencies waste taxpayer dollars and creates an unnecessarily burdensome bureaucracy. In an effort to reduce duplication and overlap in the federal government, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is now responsible for filing an annual report outlining duplicative goals, programs, and responsibilities. In […]

Federal spending, both in real terms as well as a percentage of gross domestic product, has swollen to near-historic levels. An equally alarming, but less high-profile trend compound taxpayers’ concerns: government watchdogs, tasked to sniff out waste, fraud, and abuse, are being starved of money, compromising their oversight capabilities over the exploding federal leviathan.