The late writer and satirist P.J. O’Rourke once famously noted, “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” He should have apologized to teenage boys.

In 2011, President Barack Obama signed the GPRA Modernization Act, bipartisan legislation intended to improve government accountability and transparency. The measure required the White House Office of Management and Budget to compile and publish an annual list of federal programs.

Fifteen years later, American taxpayers are still waiting.

The federal government has grown so vast and unwieldy that the OMB has yet to comply with the legislation. Congress amended the original law in 2021, Reason magazine reports, giving the office until January 2025 to finish the task. Yet that was still too tall an order.

Indeed, a review released this month by the General Accounting Office found that “OMB has not yet fully addressed 13 of the 20 requirements” in the 2011 law. “For example,” the report noted, “the inventory does not yet include all federal programs, such as foreign assistance or defense programs. It also does not provide all required program, spending and performance information for the more than 2,600 programs currently included in it.”

A cynic might argue that this is by design. A single data base including this vital information might be quite illuminating and become a potent argument for paring back the size and scope of Washington’s domain. But the explanation for the inertia is likely prosaic: Expansive public-sector bureaucracies — unlike their private-sector counterparts — have little incentive to embrace efficiency and financial restraint.

But the federal fiscal fog has real consequences. “A comprehensive listing of programs,” the GAO observed, “along with related funding and performance information, would help federal decision-makers and the public better understand what the government does, what it spends and what it achieves each year. Without a complete inventory, decision-makers lack a critical tool to help them better identify and manage fragmentation, overlap and duplication across the federal government.”

The failure of the OMB should be vindication for Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency endeavor. Leftist critics attacked it relentlessly, yet a government that can’t provide basic information about its endeavors and expenditures is in dire need of radical reform.

In addition, the GAO’s revelation serves as a repudiation to Democrats who argue unconvincingly that the nation has a revenue problem rather than a spending issue. Before Beltway politicians demand more money, they would be wise to first get a handle on where the trillions they’ve already collected actually goes.

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