Many agencies’ headcount haven’t grown much, but their appropriations have skyrocketed. From Open The Books at openthebooks.substack.com:
As DOGE continues searching for and flagging waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government, American taxpayers are hearing about a lot of outrageous spending – and obscure agencies and projects – for the first time.
The scandalous spending at USAID on foreign programs (think a transgender opera in Colombia) and progressive NGO’s (think The Aspen Institute) set off an explosion of headlines. Separately, our own auditors found $22 BILLION spent by the Office of Refugee Resettlement – a division of Health and Human Services – on aid to migrants since 2020. Again, NGO’s were granted the money to go out and act as ideological proxies for the Biden administration.
It’s become clear that Americans need an exhaustive map of the federal government and how much spending at each agency has grown over time.
When we began that work, we immediately found another problem.
Record keeping within the Federal Register, which is supposed to be the definitive guide to government policy, is shockingly bad.
At least 75 agencies listed there are effectively defunct or obsolete; they’ve been subsumed by other entities, renamed, or don’t even exist any longer.
Not only are agencies listed that are long-defunct, but records of those agencies are often not updated, so members of the public must conduct deep research to ascertain the composition of their own government.
The vast scope of DOGE’s task becomes much clearer in that context.
We doubled down and began taking inventory of the remaining agencies that do exist, so that taxpayers can track the changing number of federal employees per agency and the growth in expenditures over the years. We’re untangling this web in a public database.
