Last December, John Beale, a former Environmental Protection Agency senior policy adviser, was sentenced to 32 months in prison for scamming hardworking taxpayers out of nearly $1 million.
While working for the EPA, he falsely claimed that he was assigned to an interagency special advisory group and was working with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations one day each week, when in reality he just had a paid day off.
According to EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins, whose office discovered the scam, Beale was able to rip off taxpayers for more than a decade because of “an absence of even basic internal controls at the EPA.”
What Beale did is absolutely outrageous but, sadly, his story is not an isolated incident. The bloated federal government is rife with waste, fraud and abuse. Here are a few more examples:
The federal government allows legal brothels in Nevada to claim $17.5 million annually in tax deductions through the tax code; the federal government wastes more than 20 percent (amounting to billions yearly) on federal construction projects using a racist Davis-Bacon law.
Each year the federal government wastes approximately $1.67 billion maintaining more than 77,000 vacant or underutilized federal properties; even more atrocious is the Inspector General’s 2013 report that revealed the State Department squandered $630,000 “buying fans” for its social media accounts.
As a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform – the chief government watchdog – I have a powerful perch from which to expose waste, fraud and abuse within the federal bureaucracy. We work hand-in-hand with each agency’s Office of the Inspector General, which serve as the general auditors of federal agencies.
One would hope that the federal agency in which an abuse occurred would offer corrective measures once waste is brought to light, but as we saw in the IRS targeting scandal and the Department of Justice’s reckless Fast and Furious scheme, Congress cannot rely on the executive branch to hold its own personnel accountable.
Congress must act on its own at times by introducing standalone legislation to fill in the gaps. During the IRS targeting scandal, the bureaucrats in the executive branch kept saying that no laws were technically broken in the targeting of conservative groups. Consequently, I introduced a bill, the IRS Anti-Abuse Act (H.R 2025), to make such actions punishable by mandatory termination.
Another critical part of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse is getting back to regular order in the budget process. Under regular order, each federal program’s effectiveness is reviewed annually. Then Congress can make informed choices as to whether it would like to improve, maintain or eliminate each program.
Shockingly, this process has not been followed since 1994. Rather than adopting a budget resolution that caps spending levels and then appropriating funds through 12 different bills, Congress chose this year to fund the government through one massive, 1,582-page bill that legislators were given only 48 hours to read. This process did not allow for amendments that cut reckless spending and was passed two and a half months into the fiscal year.
Our citizens expect and deserve a lean, efficient federal government that only funds effective and necessary programs. This year, I will continue the fight to eliminate as much waste as possible through any and all means necessary. With a $17 trillion plus federal debt, the time to act is now. We, both Democrats and Republicans, must chart a responsible budget course that eliminates waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government.
Rep. Paul Gosar is an Arizona Republican and member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Click HERE to view this op-ed in The Arizona Republic.
