Voice to Congress

Government Spending

What We Have

What We Want

What You Can Do

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Why Pay More And Get Less

1. Fragmentation.
   The U.S. runs many public functions through overlapping federal, state, local, and quasi-private systems. That often means multiple funding streams, conflicting rules, duplicated administration, and blurred accountability. GAO's annual duplication work is evidence that this is a real structural problem.

2. High administrative and transaction costs.
   The U.S. often pays extra for complexity itself: contracting layers, billing systems, compliance burden, legal overhead, and fragmented program management. In health care, for example, OECD notes the U.S. has the highest per-capita health costs in the OECD, driven largely by higher prices, yet still has below-average life expectancy. That is a classic pay-more-get-less pattern.

3. Politics often rewards distribution, not performance.
   Congress is very good at allocating money geographically and politically. It is much less disciplined about designing long-horizon performance systems with measurable returns. Budgets are often organized around constituencies and committees rather than citizen outcomes.

4. Debt service is eating future capacity.
   When interest costs rise this fast, future taxpayers pay for yesterday's commitments instead of tomorrow's solutions. CBO's outlook shows net interest moving above $1 trillion annually and climbing much further afterward.