Government Waste Runs Deep

Gross over regulation, massive expansion to bureaucracy, and opaque spending shows government waste runs deep, and it needs to be cut.

April 14, 2025

By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

Saying a government is wasteful or inefficient isn’t really groundbreaking. Universally, people acknowledge the bureaucratic nonsense that inevitably accompanies any government initiative. They understand that for every dollar in taxes they take, a percentage of it is lost to some worthless thing. To what degree that is happening in each government is where the shock and awe comes in.

Swedish historian, Johan Norberg, made a great docu-film about how Sweden went from a poor economy in the late 1800s, to a great economy leading into the 1960s, back to a poor economy in the mid-seventies to the early nineties, and now a more efficient one in the 2000s. It was difficult at first for them, too, with all the austerity, reduction in regulations on business, elimination of payroll taxes, and privatization of many services. They have a massive welfare state, and they tax their poor and middle classes much more than the United States to afford it.

But what Sweden did to turn around it’s economy in the nineties is a case study against central planning and for free enterprise.

The US federal and state governments spend a lot, but much of it never even reaches its well-intended destination. Some examples include:

• Andrew Cuomo spent $453 million on 247,343 medical devices for COVID, but only used three of them.
• The Biden administration spent $42 billion on an internet program that connected zero people.

Government waste runs deep, and it adds up quickly. You could look at one item and say it’s insignificant to the $36 trillion in debt. But if that is happening across all line items over the course of decades, the mathematical significance becomes evident.

DOGE

Whatever DOGE finds in inefficiencies, there are some charts that break down just how dire the financial situation is for the United States. Government waste runs deep, and some of it popped up rather suddenly in the last 5 years (2019-2024):

• Federal regulations … increased… with some 290 additional rules and nearly 10 million words added to administrative law books.
• The fastest-growing category of federal spending is interest on the national debt, which more than doubled during that period. Interest payments on the national debt (not including repaying the debt itself) now cost more than any single government program except Social Security.
• The national debt grew by 56 percent… topping $35 trillion. Since 2012, it has exceeded the value of all goods and services sold in the United States, known as the gross domestic product. As of 2024, the federal debt was about 120 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
• The federal government grew by about 150,000… That increase is more than the total number of people employed by either Boeing or Verizon… The federal government employs about 3.1 million people, not including the military or federal contractors.

How is it that US economic prosperity is in its rear view mirror despite all these extra programs? If these programs were so essential, why was the US doing better without them? Which is exactly what Sweden asked itself when nearly 75,000 people marched on their government in protest of their payroll taxes and the mandate to shift ownership of businesses to the workers.

Enough is enough. The US did fine without all these rules and spending, it’ll manage again if they are cut. Nothing should be so precious that it cannot be done extra-governmentally.

Expired Agencies

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Milton Friedman nailed it, and the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) is proving just how true this is. Real Clear Investigators calls them “Zombie Agencies” because they live on despite being dead:

1,503 agencies or programs live on despite expired authorizations, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Another 155 will expire on Sept. 30. The Zombies, nearly half of which have been officially dead for more than a decade, persist in a budgetary netherworld. In a deep dive last year, CBO analysts were able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, with total expenditures of $516 billion. They don’t know how much funding the other programs received.

The total federal budget in 2024 was $6.8 trillion, meaning expired Zombie programs take up at least 8% of the budget, and likely much more.

DOGE hasn’t even looked at all this yet. But there are over one thousand examples of programs that should’ve been sunset and never were. Instead, congress kept shuffling money to them. It is indeed a failure of congress not to act on these:

• The Federal Election Commission … was expected to spend $9.4 million per year before its authorization expired in 1981. Yet the agency continued to receive funding and spent $95 million in 2024
• The Federal Communications Commission was originally allocated $339.6 million per year. Its funding authorization expired in 2020, yet it spent $28.4 billion last year.
• The Foreign Relations Authorization Act … expired in 2003. Yet in 2024, Congress spent $38.4 billion on 24 of the law’s programs, allowing legislators to influence the White House’s foreign policy and security assistance to other nations.
• The House Committee on Energy and Commerce, now led by Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), supported the funding of 346 expired programs, more than any other committee, the CBO found.
• The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, now chaired by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), spent more identifiable money than any other group: $153.5 billion.

If I were being generous, I’d accept that they were needed when enacted, but likewise needed to sunset when the time came. Yet they never did. It’s like ignoring a mounting pile of laundry. At some point the work must be done, and they keep punting. It would be incredibly easy to wipe the slate clean and just let everything sunset.

What is baffling is, the executive cannot enforce the very reauthorization clauses in the laws that were written. He cannot say, “This funding is illegitimate because this program was never reauthorized by congress as required by their own law.” So the US is stuck paying into these programs until congress gets to work and cleans it up.

Government waste runs deep, and it’s not just in the form of fiscal malfeasance. It’s in the form of expired programs. These things add up especially over time. The US didn’t just jump from zero to $36 trillion in debt overnight. It’s stuff like that that compounded over decades. A lot of it is just negligence and failure to oversee the spending.

EPA

In the last five years, the federal government has spent $4.6 billion on furniture. That’s right. Furniture. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) alone has spent $95 million in the past ten years on furniture.

So while the government refused to modernize or digitize their procedures, it does apparently like to redecorate and keep up with the trends when it comes to its furnishings.

The new head of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, intends to cut 65% of the agency. The first three rounds of cuts amounted to approximately $227.5 million. The latest round in cuts has yielded another $1.7 Billion, with a pending $20 billion of frozen funding sitting in a financial institution.

That $20 billion is under scrutiny after a video from James O’Keefe exposed an (now former) employee confessing to spending as much money as possible before Trump took office; likening it to throwing gold bars off the Titanic. Evidently, that money is being funneled through very opaque and unaccountable NGOs, doing who-knows-what.

Regarding all these cuts, Zeldin explained in an interview with Megyn Kelly:

“To give you an idea of how that compares to the agency’s budget, our operating budget is about $10 billion a year,” he noted. “Yet somehow, through congressional Democrats… over $60 billion was obligated and spent through EPA in 2024.” That number will be reduced by 65 percent – or $22 billion – in 2025.

Government waste runs deep, especially under the guise of noble causes like “environmental protections”. But these dollars were doing nothing to actually remediate environmental issues. The environment is no worse for wear since it never benefited from these dollars.

Despite the panic many who oppose the cuts will go into, it’s important to remember that the US did fine with a fifth of this level of spending. In fact, when US spending was under $1.5 trillion rather than $6.8, the US actually had a surplus rather than a deficit. That was in 1997. If we adjusted for inflation, the US budget should be around $2.8 trillion or 60% less than it is now.

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