Why fund a wasteful government program once when you can fund it twice—or, for that matter, 82 times? According to a report on duplication and overlap in the federal government released by the Government Accountability Office today, the U.S. government has 82 distinct programs to improve teacher quality (which, judging from our schools, is clearly working quite well). Many of those programs “share similar goals,” according to the report, yet “there is no governmentwide strategy to minimize fragmentation, overlap, or duplication among these many programs.” Which probably helps explain how we got so many programs designed to do the same damn thing in the first place.
Teacher quality programs were just one area in which the GAO found significant duplication at the federal level. Indeed, the whole thing reads like a nightmare version of a Pete and Repeat joke. According to The Wall Street Journal’s summary of the report, the U.S. government has “15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, more than 20 separate programs to help the homeless, and 80 programs for economic development.” Eggs are given double scrutiny: