The Government Accountability Office has released its January 2009 High Risk report. Can you hear the air being sucked out of the room?

The biannual risk report, issued to coincide with the seating of a new Congress, prioritizes trouble areas in government and presents recommendations for solutions. It is partly a “hall of shame,” partly a plea for help and attention. Congress then proceeds to ignore the list. 

This year’s report added three new high-risk areas, and removed one, for a total of 30. Not that it matters. Of the 51 areas the GAO has designated as high-risk since 1990, the year the list began, just 19 have graduated from the list. That’s a 37% success rate – not an encouraging statistic.

What’s worse, a number of trouble areas from GAO’s very first list are still there, a sign that either they or Congress have their priorities out of whack.

Known as the “investigative arm of Congress,” the GAO lets Congress know just what the government is spending money on, and then attempts to show where concerns about that spending should exist. Created in 1921, the agency was given auditing responsibilities, accounting, and claims functions (formerly overseen by the Treasury Department), as a result of federal financing mismanagement at the end of World War I. The GAO claims to be an independent, nonpartisan agency  (don’t they all?) focusing its mission on investigating how the federal government is spending taxpayer dollars. 

This year’s newly identified risk areas span a wide range of government activity, from “The Financial Institution Regulation System” to “FDA Oversight of Medical Products” to “EPA Assessments of Toxic Chemicals.” GAO believes these areas to be at risk to “fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” Removed from the list was the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control modernization.

As slow moving as Congress has been, the GAO hasn’t been particularly emphatic either. Only this January did GAO identify the Financial Regulatory System as a high-risk area. (By contrast, it issued a special high-risk notice last March on the U.S. Census.) No wonder guys like Bernard Madoff and the AIG executive team were able to pull off the scams they did. On the spectrum of government awareness failures, this ranks right up there with Iraqi WMD and the failure to see the 9/11 plot. 

On the flipside, the GAO removed the FAA and their air traffic control modernization -- which seems to run contrary to the world of air travel. Just last August FAA computers delayed hundreds of flights across the U.S. Additionally, both the number of passengers and amount of freight on U.S. flights were down from 2007 to 2008. In light of this, one has to wonder whether the actions taken by the FAA led to a removal of high-risk status, or if the true reason was a decrease in flights.

In reading through these GAO reports, there appear to often be tenuous connections between premise and conclusion. Moreover, of those areas that have been removed from the high-risk list, it is questionable whether they are truly better off than they were before the designation.

Air traffic modernization aside, there have been other curious developments within the GAO list. In 2007, the U.S. Postal Service was removed from the list because of progress made with regard to massive debt, a projected deficit of over $2 billion, and outdated modes for addressing these concerns. But as reported here at OhMyGov!, the US Postal Service is still plagued with major issues, and is considering a reduction in service to 5 days a week.

For those who believe that the government is inefficient or curious about what problems are looming and how it can address them, this report is an interesting document to scan through.
 

Also of Interest:

GAO unveils new website identifying urgent issues for Obama administration

Census at "high risk" says GAO 

Looking for legislative priorities? Try the GAO "high-risk" list

Government credit card abuse noted by GAO