Congress is failing at governing and oversight by continuing to throw good money after bad.
Case in point: Spending on expired federal programs is on the rise, growing by 6 percent compared to last year and by 77 percent since 2012.
The legislature is supposed to spend money in a two-step process of authorization and appropriation. But for a growing number of expired programs, Congress is skipping the re-authorization part. This reduces oversight and increases spending that’s of dubious nature.
In 2022 alone, Congress allocated $461 billion in spending for federal programs whose authorizations had expired. More than half of this spending went to programs that were set to expire more than 10 years ago. This is according to a new Congressional Budget Office report that conveniently dropped just a few days before Labor Day weekend.
Some of the spending in this broad bucket may be warranted, such as certain spending for veterans’ health care or for limited activities of the State Department.
Other unauthorized spending is ineffective, wasteful, and unconstitutional.
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Such as Head Start, a federal pre-school program that fails to consistently improve a range of outcomes for children.
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Or the Childcare and Development Fund which does more harm than good with exposed children having “experienced lower math and reading scores and an increase in behavioral problems,” as highlighted by my colleagues Ryan Bourne and Vanessa Calder.
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Or the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, a federal job training program that fails to measurably improve earnings among its target population. As my colleague Chris Edwards pointed out: “Federal job training programs have been known for their wastefulness since the New Deal when the word “boondoggle” was adopted to describe them.”
Like zombies, these programs just won’t die. Instead, they continue gobbling up taxpayer dollars and driving up the national debt.
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