Government Waste: This Is the Business You Have Chosen
Sunday’s Washington Post, the daily record of the political class, contains some fine reporting on the malfeasance of that class. Leading the paper and the website is a big investigative story titled “Million‐Dollar Wasteland.” Reporters Debbie Cenziper and Jonathan Mummolo write:
The federal government’s largest housing construction program for the poor has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them.
Nationwide, nearly 700 projects awarded $400 million have been idling for years, a Washington Post investigation found. Some have languished for a decade or longer even as much of the country struggles with record‐high foreclosures and a dramatic loss of affordable housing.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the nation’s housing fund, has largely looked the other way: It does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals, instead trusting local agencies to police projects.
The result is a trail of failed developments in every corner of the country. Fields where apartment complexes were promised are empty and neglected. Houses that were supposed to be renovated are boarded up and crumbling, eyesores in decaying neighborhoods… .
The Post examined every major project currently funded under the HUD program, analyzing a database of 5,100 projects worth $3.2 billion, studying more than 600 satellite images and collecting information from 165 housing agencies nationwide.
The yearlong investigation uncovered a dysfunctional system that delivers billions of dollars to local housing agencies with few rules, safeguards or even a reliable way to track projects. The lapses have led to widespread misspending and delays in a two‐decade‐old program meant to deliver decent housing to the working poor.
The Post found breakdowns at every level.
And so on for three full pages.
It was reminiscent of another Sunday story two months ago that I wrote about under the title “A Routine, Run‐of‐the‐Mill Half‐Billion‐Dollar Corruption Story.” The Post teased that one as “A D.C. lawyer and her associates secured $500 million in federal contracts to benefit Alaska native corporations. Less than one percent made it back to Alaska,” and reporter Robert O’Harrow Jr. found:
For years as a lawyer in Washington, Paralee White had helped small and disadvantaged firms break into the federal contracting market.
Then she decided to help herself.
She started a business and was soon making more than $500,000 a year through a contracting program intended to help poor Alaska natives, even though she isn’t an Alaska native.
White also helped her family. She hired her sister and brother, paying them as much as $280,000 a year. She helped her sister’s boyfriend set up his own firm in partnership with Alaska natives. He made more than $500,000 a year.
White’s story offers a look at how Washington insiders can make fortunes from government programs intended to benefit small, disadvantaged and minority entrepreneurs. It also illustrates how government officials who are supposed to keep tabs on these programs often fail to do so.
Outrage ensued, right? Angry editorials, congressional hearings? Not much, even though it was hardly the first time that the problems with the Alaska Native Corporations program had been noted. There was a Senate hearing, with the reassuring title of “Promise Fulfilled: The Role of the SBA 8(a) Program in Enhancing Economic Development in Indian Country,” where “Alaska Natives and a Small Business Administration official defended federal contracting preferences for Indian and Native firms.” No critics were invited to the hearing. After all, “The purpose of the hearing is to allow the SBA, ANCS, NHOs, Indian tribes, shareholders and other stakeholders the opportunity to demonstrate the importance and legitimacy of the program to Native communities in fulfilling self‐determination and self‐sufficiency,” as 49‐year senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Alaska’s own Sen. Mark Begich wrote in a letter to whippersnapper senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI), who has served in Congress for only 34 of his 86 years and chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
Meanwhile, there were a couple of other intriguing points in Sunday’s Post. In a column on “four days of hearings about the hiring scandals hobbling D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray,” Robert McCartney wrote:
The main thing learned in the hearings so far is that Gray showed bad judgment in allowing the Sorority to guide so much of the hiring for patronage jobs just below the cabinet rank. Although all three advisers were longtime personnel executives, they blundered repeatedly by overpaying people, doing inadequate vetting and hiring children of officials (including those of Green and Hall).
With Green’s testimony Friday, all three have now appeared before Cheh’s committee investigating the scandal. The results have been distasteful for anyone who’d like public servants to be straight forward and transparent, especially when speaking under oath.
And an article on Amtrak’s annual billion‐dollar deficits included this gem:
Critics in Congress also have questioned Amtrak’s management, asking, for example, how an employee with a $21,000 salary earned $149,000 in overtime last fiscal year.
Newspapers are full of stories about serious men and clowns running for president, about who’s up and who’s down in political maneuvering, about Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. All fine topics indeed. But if journalists spent even 10 percent of their time digging into how the federal government is spending $3,600,000,000,000 this year, who knows how many stories of waste and deadweight loss we’d find? Of course, the newspapers would probably go out of business, because such stories are expensive to do and they don’t bring in the eyeballs like horse‐race and celebrity stories.
I generally don’t think that “waste, fraud, and abuse” is the key to cutting federal spending; you have to go after the big programs, like transfer payments and military spending. But as Everett Dirksen almost said, $500 million here, $500 million there, pretty soon you’re talking real money. And there are reasons that government programs are often characterized by waste, fraud, and abuse. Politicians tend to respond to interest groups who stand to receive benefits from any particular program rather than to the average citizen who will pay very little for each program. Policymakers have less incentive to control costs and improve efficiency than do people in the private sector with their own money (or their boss’s money) at risk. As government gets bigger, it becomes less and less possible to have meaningful oversight and transparency — though we can hope that new technologies may help somewhat on the transparency side.
And for those who like big government, I have to say: This is the business you have chosen. If you want the federal government to tax (and borrow) and transfer $3.6 trillion a year, if you want it to build housing for the poor and give special benefits to Alaska Natives, if you want it to supply Americans with health care and school lunches and retirement security and local bike paths, then you have to accept that such programs come with incentive problems, politicization, corruption, and waste. Maybe it’s worth the cost.