The Feds have just revealed a deep, dark secret...they have no idea how many agencies they're asking us to pay for!
There is - wait for it - no complete official government list of federal agencies and programs telling the federal government what your tax dollars are supporting.
Needless to say, there are laws that say the feds are supposed to compile this information. The Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) — which President Obama signed into law on January 4, 2011 — established required quarterly performance assessments of all government programs, and also mandated that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) create a website that was supposed to publish quarterly performance reports by the heads of each agency.
Not only does that website — Performance.gov. launched in 2011 — only a partial list of government programs,(even the FCC isn't on the list) but the quarterly performance reports for even the agencies listed are conspicuous by their absence.
This should give you a clue about how the vast bureaucracy mandated by ObamaCare is going to function.
There isn't even a uniform standard about how strategic and performance plans data is published, something GPRAMA also mandated. Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute was quoted by the Daily Caller as saying that not only isn't there a list of federal agencies that exists, but that there's no standard machine-readable federal government organization chart or report format.
According to Harper, Many reports are currently published in formats like PDF instead of XML or StratML, which make it more difficult for the data to be useful to a computer.
There was a bill to establish reporting these kind of reporting standards supported by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa that successfully made it through the House in 2012.. only to die in the Senate.
Ah Washington! It's fun spending other people's money!
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