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According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), it has saved taxpayers from over $74 billion of would-be government waste since 2003. Federal watchdogs, like the GAO and the federal council of inspectors general, investigate wasteful spending and give suggestions to government agencies about how to eliminate it. Here's the catch, federal agencies don't have to listen them. To address this issue, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management held a hearing to explore why government agencies rarely heed cost-cutting recommendations from watchdogs.

Government agencies spent $8 million to put 12 primates on treadmills in Texas and paid $30,000 in fines for a host of federal violations, including performing a necropsy on a baboon that was still alive. The Southwest National Primate Research Center, in San Antonio, received grants from the National Institutes of Health to run the study. Over the past decade, the facility collected nearly $70 million from various federal agencies. During the same period, the center was slapped with more than $30,000 in penalties for abuse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture identified 14 violations of the Animal Welfare Act at...

There was the weekend trip for President Barack Obama and his daughters to New York, including a Broadway show and a private museum tour. The ski trip to Aspen, Colorado, for first lady Michelle Obama in February. And lots and lots of golf in Florida, Southern California and Martha's Vineyard, Mass. Now as the Obama family departs Friday on its annual holiday vacation to Hawaii, new estimates put the price tag of the Obamas' 2015 trips that are all or largely personal at $11.6 million for travel costs alone, according to the conservative group Judicial Watch, based on federal government...

Paul Anthony Gosar is an American Republican politician and member of the United States House of Representatives from Arizona since 2011, representing Arizona's 4th congressional district. Yesterday, Gosar took to his Facebook page to expose the reality of the massive Omnibus Spending Bill... and who is to blame... Why I Am Voting NO on the Massive Omnibus Spending Bill: Once again I find myself shaking my head at the wasteful spending in DC and a flawed process that drops thousands of pages of text on us with 48 hours to "read" and understand. I wish I could put all the...

Yes, you read the headline correctly. Michigan’s Medicaid expansion program includes $50 Wal-Mart gift cards for Medicaid enrollees that “follow the doctor’s orders.” It seems that although, “the state doesn’t itself purchase or give out any Wal-Mart gift cards, their cost is baked into the Medicaid managed care contracts.” In essence, the taxpayers of Michigan are paying for $50 Wal-Mart gift cards for people on Medicaid whether they know it or not. And getting one of these gift cards is pretty easy.

When not pleading poverty, the Department of Veterans Affairs can be awfully careless with its money.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) paid individuals acting as representatives for disabled beneficiaries nearly $50 million even though they were dead.An audit from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) is just the latest example of the SSA’s inability to figure out who on their rolls is still alive.The audit focused on “representative payees,” or a person who manages another’s finances due to mental or physical limitations. The OIG found that many payees acting on behalf of disability beneficiaries had died.“SSA did not ensure new representative payees were selected when current payees died,” the OIG said. “Based on our sample results,...

A government audit finds that the Social Security Disability Insurance program paid out $16.8 billion in disability benefits over the past decade to about four million people who either were working, made too much money, were in prison, were dead, weren't eligible or were no longer physically or mentally disabled.

Taxpayers lost $833 million over the last decade on the food and beverages supplied by Amtrak, which managed to spend $1.70 for every dollar that received in revenue. “Over the last ten years, these losses have amounted to a staggering $833.8 million,” said Rep.John Mica, R-Fla., in a statement previewing a House hearing today. “It costs passengers $9.50 to buy a cheeseburger on Amtrak, but the cost to taxpayers is $16.15. Riders pay $2.00 for a Pepsi, but each of these sodas costs the U.S. Treasury $3.40.”"Amazon.com is currently selling 24-packs of 12 ounce Pepsi cans for $8.94 -- which...

Thrifty Lefties?: Media fret over missile defense waste by Daniel Clark In reaction to David Willman’s April 4th Los Angeles Times article, the media have expressed alarm over wasteful missile defense spending. The report, which the Pentagon disputes, says that several failed initiatives have cost the taxpayers $10 billion over ten years. Although this only represents about one-eighth of the Missile Defense Agency budget, liberals have seized upon it to claim that our entire missile defense system is a boondoggle. There are good reasons to be skeptical of the Times report. For one, it describes the Sea-Based X-Band Radar system...

95 percent of Puerto Ricans speak SpanishThe Social Security Administration (SSA) approved disability benefits for hundreds of Puerto Ricans because they do not speak English, despite the fact that Puerto Rico is a predominantly Spanish-speaking territory.According to a new audit by the Office of Inspector General (OIG), the agency is misapplying rules that are intended to provide financial assistance to individuals who are illiterate or cannot speak English in the United States. Under the rules, Puerto Ricans are allowed to receive disability benefits for their inability to speak English as well.“We found the Agency did not make exceptions regarding the...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Google billionaires request $539 million federal bailout after spending $1.6 billion of “stimulus” funding on failed solar power project Ivanpah is a solar power company owned by Google, BrightSource Energy, and NRG.In April 2011, as part of Obama’s “stimulus,” Obama gave Ivanpah a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to build a solar power plant.In November 2014, when the plant was up and running, it produced only half as much electricity as what Ivanpah had predicted.Ivanpah blamed this failure on “clouds,” and asked Obama for a $539 million bailout.Google is owned by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. At...

In 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services estimated that 72.2 million Americans were receiving Medicaid benefits for at least a month. Medicaid is a government health insurance program aimed at helping the poor and disabled. Enrollment into the program is going up dramatically, according to the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). Both Medicaid and ChildrenÂ’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) are up 15 percent, or 8.7 million people, since Obamacare began enrolling people in the fall of 2013; states that expanded Medicaid coverage are seeing 22 percent growth or more. For many states, Medicaid is the largest item of...

Before the tryptophan in the turkey induces somnolence, give thanks for living in such an entertaining country. This year, for example, we learned that California’s legislature includes 93 persons who seem never to have had sex. They enacted the “affirmative consent” law directing college administrators to tell students that sexual consent cannot be silence but must be “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement” and “ongoing throughout a sexual activity.” Claremont McKenna College requires “all” — not “both,” which would discriminate against groups — participants in a sexual engagement to understand that withdrawal of consent can be any behavior conveying “that an...

Republican Senator Tom Coburn has compiled a list of some of the government’s more infuriating wastes of our tax money. These are some of the worst of the worst. The National Science Foundation (NSF) will burn through $171,361.00 observing monkeys gambling to determine how to combat gambling addiction in humans. The NSF also flushed away over $200,000 of our money to understand why Wikipedia is sexist – really? The (NSF) spent over 856,000 dollars to “teach mountain lions how to walk on treadmills as part of a research project whose aim was to better understand mountain lions’ instincts.” Because the...

I-Team review finds $30,000 in one agency’s Starbucks purchases kept confidential from public The federal government has spent at least $20 billion in taxpayer money this year on items and services that it is permitted to keep secret from the public, according to an investigation by the News4 I-Team. The purchases, known among federal employees as “micropurchases,” are made by some of the thousands of agency employees who are issued taxpayer-funded purchase cards. The purchases, in most cases, remain confidential and are not publicly disclosed by the agencies. A sampling of those purchases, obtained by the I-Team via the Freedom...

Around a year ago, this column ran a piece entitled “Whatever Happened To Science?” As Baby Boomers will recall, during our early youth, our little heads were crammed full of the promise of Science: Abundant cheap electrical power; the discovery of the structure of DNA would (somehow) lead to curing every disease, and the polio vaccine seemed to demonstrate this; our soaring postwar economy could easily fund ever more dramatic breakthroughs. But then, as the 1960s dawned, reality set in. An extraordinary number of people were dying of heart disease, and good old Watson & Crick (or Salk & Sabin)...

Years ago, I shared a very funny poster that suggests that more government is hardly ever the right answer to any question.Yet in Washington, the standard response to any screwup by government is to make government even bigger. Sort ofMitchellÂ’s Law on steroids.And thatÂ’s exactly whatÂ’s happening with the Ebola crisis. The bureaucracies that have received tens of billions of dollars over the years to preclude a crisis are now expecting to get rewarded with more cash.Governor Jindal of Louisiana debunks the notion that more money for the bureaucracy is some sort of elixir. HereÂ’s some of what he wrote...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent more than $39 million on obese lesbians, origami condoms, texting drunks, and dozens of other projects that could have been scrapped in favor of developing an Ebola vaccine. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready,” said NIH Director Francis Collins, blaming budget cuts for his agency’s failure to develop a vaccine for the deadly virus. However, the Washington Free Beacon has uncovered $39,643,352 worth...

The European Commission published a study on Monday (13 October) providing the first full dataset on energy costs and subsidies for the 28 member countries across the different power generation technologies, revealing that the largest share of public intervention in the energy sector has been in favor of solar and on-shore wind energy. The results show that in 2012, the total value of public intervention in energy in the member countries has been between €120-140 billion. The report finds that the largest amounts of current public support in 2012 went to renewables, in particular to solar (€14.7 billion) and onshore...