Billions Wasted on Duplicative Federal Programs

Investors.com has an excellent article on government waste. Here are some excerpts:

• The Government Accountability Office's latest annual report on government waste and duplication found 31 areas in the government that overlap, duplicate efforts or are egregiously inefficient. That's on top of the 131 found in its previous two annual reports. In many cases, the government has no idea whether any of these programs actually work.
• Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who pushed for this report, figures the latest examples alone add up to $95 billion — more than the spending cuts under this year's "sequester." There are, for example, 23 agencies pushing more than 670 renewable energy programs, a quarter of which President Obama added. In wind energy alone, nine agencies threw $4 billion at 82 wind energy projects in 2011.
• Four federal agencies run 21 separate college aid programs that cost more than $140 billion a year, including eight targeted tax breaks, four subsidized loan programs, two grant programs, and a half-dozen others run by the Veterans Administration and Defense. Yet nobody, according to the GAO, has bothered to evaluate "the effectiveness of this assistance."
• There are six job training programs for veterans, but neither the VA nor the Labor Department has bothered to determine whether the $1.2 billion spent on them gets any results.