The Political Pages

More same old, same old politics from the Clinton/Gore administration. Tell people lies and hope we never figure it out. Republicans are going to need to stay both focused and united for victory in 2000. I look forward to working with you toward that goal.

Jamie Miller
North Florida field director
Republican Party of Florida

Report: Gore Project Overstated Savings
By KAREN GULLO
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (Aug. 18) - Some of the cost savings claimed by Vice President Al Gore's project to streamline government were overstated, and other cuts in expenses can't be substantiated, according to auditors who looked at changes in three agencies.

Gore's "reinventing government" project claimed $21.8 billion in savings it lacked evidence to support, inflated savings by double-counting cost cuts and took credit for savings that may have been the result of other efforts to cut government bureaucracy, the General Accounting Office report said.

Project officials also neglected to take into account expenses that offset some of the savings, said the GAO, Congress' auditing and investigative arm.

White House officials disputed the GAO findings and said offsets to the savings were accounted for. They acknowledged that savings were overstated by several hundred million dollars but said the reinventing project is on track to save an estimated $137 billion and characterized the GAO's findings as "an arcane debate about accounting."

"What really matters is that government is smaller than it's been since the Kennedy administration, and it operates better, more efficiently and is saving taxpayers money," said Linda Ricci, spokeswoman at the White House Office of Management and Budget, which calculated the savings estimates for Gore's project.

A House Republican who requested the report seized on its findings to criticize Gore, the front-running Democratic presidential candidate. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said the report released Monday shows that Gore "greatly exaggerated the success of his National Partnership for Reinventing Government."

"It looks like they were reinventing accounting rules," Burton said.

Gore launched the reinventing project in 1993, promising to make government "work better and cost less" by reducing bureaucracy, cutting contracting costs and relying more on technology. Project officials claim $107 billion in savings and say they have "locked into place" another $29.6 billion in savings.

GAO looked at almost $30 billion in claimed savings from reinvention initiatives at NASA and the departments of Agriculture and Energy. They found several problems:

OMB did not keep records supporting $21.8 billion in claimed savings.

Ricci said OMB did not save worksheets from the calculations, some of which were done six years ago. But she said that OMB budget specialists could reconstruct how they calculated the savings.

OMB double-counted estimated savings in at least two instances, thereby inflating cost cuts.

Ricci disputed GAO's findings and said OMB analysts inadvertently double-counted in only one case, leading to an overstatement of about $770 million in savings. She said that was more than offset by another counting error in which OMB underestimated about $2 billion in savings.

The project claimed savings that "could not be fully attributed to its efforts" and actually resulted from separate efforts, said GAO.

For example, Gore's project took full credit for savings at Energy Department weapons laboratories that would have occurred anyway because of the end of the Cold War, GAO noted.

Ricci said that NPR's estimate of $137 billion in savings will pan out. "While I won't predict down to the dollar," Ricci said, "we will be comfortably within that range."

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