Waste

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was formed in 2005 to prevent another 9/11 type attack. One of the reasons given is that the, training of pilots to fly planes but not take off and land them, was not discovered is that the FBI did not coordinate with the CIA. The goal was to unify and coordinate the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), which has 18 agencies and organizations spread across different departments (Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, etc.). The staff will be reduced by 40% or 700 employees. This represents an annual savings of $700 million or a million dollars per employee. This means the elimination of redundant functions and consolidating responsibilities. This is an example of how government programs overlap. Another example is the 43 federal employment and training programs with a budget of $20 billion. Studies by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) have consistently identified fragmentation, overlap, and duplication within federal employment and training programs. Without proper oversight by congress bureaucratic programs tend to grow just by their nature. The goal should be to reduce the $6 trillion federal budget by 40% which would result in a savings of $2.4 trillion and this would wipe out the projected deficit of $1.9 trillion and lead to a $500 billion surplus. This is not a new idea. In 1985 congress passed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act designed to produce a balanced budget by 1991. Congress immediately set about to mess up the act by using gimmicks and lack of enforcement and it failed.