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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (58754)	8/17/1999 5:42:00 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Which lie is more blatant? I invented the internet. or I reinvented government. Gore Project Overstated Savings By Karen Gullo Associated Press Writer Tuesday, August 17, 1999; 5:19 p.m. EDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Al Gore's project to improve government overstated some claims of cost savings and can't substantiate others, according to auditors who looked at reforms 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 streamline government, the General Accounting Office said in a report. Project officials also neglected to take into account expenses that offset some of the savings, said GAO, the auditing and investigative arm of Congress. White House officials disputed the GAO's findings and said that while some numbers may be off slightly, the reinventing project is on track to save an estimated $137 billion and improved the way the federal government works. ''What really matters is that government is smaller than its 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 to have achieved $107 billion in savings and say they have ''locked into place'' another $29.6 billion in savings. GAO looked at nearly $30 billion in claimed savings from reinvention initiatives at the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy and NASA and 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 that 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 were actually the result of 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, we will be comfortably within that range,'' said Ricci. © Copyright 1999 The Associated Press search.washingtonpost.com