America Has 137 Offices Dedicated to Cutting Government Waste, and They Are Thriving

The United States government currently operates 137 distinct bodies whose stated purpose is to make the United States government operate more efficiently. They employ a combined total of approximately 4,200 people. Their collective annual budget exceeds $800 million. Not one of them has a complete list of the others.

This is not a secret. It is not a scandal. It is, in the fullest and most American sense of the word, a system.

"Each of these offices was created for a reason," said Dr. Franklin Chu, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government Performance and Accountability, which is itself one of the 137. "The fact that those reasons overlap substantially with the reasons every other office was created does not diminish their individual mandates. If anything, it reinforces them."

Dr. Chu has been with the Institute since 2014. He has never met anyone from the Office of Regulatory Streamlining, which operates three floors below him in the same building and has a nearly identical mission statement.

A Brief and Glorious History of Efficiency

The federal government's interest in its own efficiency is not new. Herbert Hoover chaired a committee on it in 1921, before he was president, which perhaps explains certain subsequent events. Harry Truman launched a full reorganization commission in 1947. Dwight Eisenhower created an efficiency advisory board. Lyndon Johnson invented something called the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System, which was abolished by Richard Nixon, who created his own version, which was also abolished.

Each administration since has contributed at least one new efficiency body to the ecosystem, typically in the first hundred days, when optimism is at its highest and the briefings about what already exists have not yet been fully absorbed.

The result is a layered archaeological record of good intentions, each stratum representing a president who was certain that the problem with government was that no one had yet tried to fix it properly, and that the solution was an office, a task force, a czar, or some combination of all three.

The Obama administration added eleven efficiency-adjacent bodies. The Trump administration added seven while simultaneously attempting to eliminate several dozen, with mixed results. The Biden administration created the White House Office of Management Modernization, which shares approximately 70 percent of its mandate with the existing Office of Management and Budget and has, according to one OMB staffer who asked not to be named, "never once called us."

The Ecosystem in Detail

The 137 bodies can be loosely grouped into five categories, though any attempt to present this grouping to the bodies themselves would likely produce a sixth category dedicated to reviewing the grouping.

There are, first, the Oversight Offices: formal entities established by statute, typically housed within departments, tasked with identifying waste, fraud, and inefficiency in their host departments. They produce annual reports. The reports are submitted to congressional committees. The committees acknowledge receipt.

There are the Task Forces: temporary bodies convened by executive order to address a specific efficiency problem, typically given eighteen months to report back, and typically still meeting four years later because the report is "in final review."

There are the Advisory Panels: groups of outside experts, academics, and former officials assembled to provide recommendations on government modernization. They meet quarterly. Their recommendations are described as "valuable input" and filed accordingly.

There are the Working Groups: sub-bodies created by task forces or advisory panels to examine specific sub-issues, which have in several documented cases spawned their own sub-working-groups, creating organizational structures that, if mapped, would resemble less a chain of command than a coral reef.

And there are the Czars: individuals appointed with broad mandates, minimal staff, and the title of "director" or "coordinator" or, in one memorable 2010 case, "senior advisor for government transformation," who serve for an average of fourteen months before returning to the private sector to consult on government efficiency.

The New Initiative

The White House announced last month the formation of the Interagency Coordination and Duplication Review Working Group, tasked with identifying and cataloguing duplicate or overlapping efficiency offices across the federal government.

The Working Group has twelve members drawn from six agencies. It has a projected reporting date of 2031. Its budget for the current fiscal year is $4.3 million.

When asked whether the Working Group was itself aware of the Government Accountability Office's existing Duplication and Overlap identification program, which has been publishing annual reports on exactly this subject since 2011, a spokesperson said the Working Group would "of course be reviewing all relevant prior work" as part of its initial scoping phase.

The GAO's duplication reports have identified, over thirteen years, approximately $500 billion in potential savings from consolidating overlapping federal programs. Congress has acted on roughly 60 percent of the recommendations. The remaining 40 percent are described as "under review."

The GAO was not consulted during the formation of the new Working Group. A GAO spokesperson said the agency "looks forward to engaging with the Working Group through appropriate channels" and noted that its most recent duplication report, published in April, was available on its website.

Expert Commentary

"What you have here is actually a fascinating case study in institutional resilience," said Dr. Margot Hensley of the Brookings-adjacent Center for Federal Organizational Studies, which is not affiliated with Brookings but is in the same neighborhood. "Each of these bodies was created because someone identified a genuine problem. The fact that 136 other people identified the same problem simultaneously, and each created a separate body to address it without speaking to any of the others, is not evidence of failure. It's evidence of how strongly Americans feel about efficiency."

Dr. Hensley's center published a report in 2022 recommending the consolidation of federal efficiency offices. The report was 340 pages. It was reviewed by four congressional offices and two executive branch agencies. It did not result in any consolidations.

The Center is currently preparing a follow-up report examining why the 2022 report was not acted upon. It is expected to be complete in 2025, assuming funding is renewed.

Conclusion

The White House spokesperson, when asked whether the administration saw any irony in creating a new body to identify duplicate bodies, said the question reflected "a fundamental misunderstanding of how systemic change works in a complex federal environment."

She added that the Working Group would be issuing a public-facing website in the coming months, through which citizens could track its progress.

The website contract has not yet been awarded. Eighteen firms are expected to bid.

Somewhere in a federal building, a task force that was supposed to disband in 2019 is scheduling its next meeting. The conference room is already booked by a working group that doesn't know the task force exists. They will sort it out, eventually, by creating a subcommittee.

The subcommittee will be the 138th.