The 2021 GAO High-Risk List: Blueprint for a Safer, Stronger, More Effective America, House hearing transcript (March 2, 2021), GovInfo CHRG-117hhrg43756, PDF
Summary
This is the Government Publishing Office PDF of “The 2021 GAO High-Risk List,” a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on March 2, 2021 (Serial No. 117–6), with Chairwoman Maloney presiding and Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro of the Government Accountability Office as the witness. Dodaro testified that 20 high-risk areas had stayed the same, five had regressed and seven had improved. Dodaro said GAO was adding two new areas, federal efforts on drug abuse and SBA’s Emergency Loan Program, citing spending of close to $1 trillion and a need for greater oversight to minimize fraud. The index of documents lists a Kansas report on unemployment claims and fraud submitted by Representative LaTurner.
Summary drafted by a model from the document's text below and checked by script against that text before publication. It is a navigation aid, not a reading of what the document proves. Where AI is used
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THE 2021 GAO HIGH-RISK LIST:
BLUEPRINT FOR A SAFER, STRONGER,
MORE EFFECTIVE AMERICA
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON
OVERSIGHT AND REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
MARCH 2, 2021
Serial No. 117–6
Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Reform
(
Available on: govinfo.gov,
oversight.house.gov or
docs.house.gov
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
43–756 PDF WASHINGTON : 2021
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York, Chairwoman
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of JAMES COMER, Kentucky, Ranking Minority
Columbia Member
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts JIM JORDAN, Ohio
JIM COOPER, Tennessee PAUL A. GOSAR, Arizona
GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina
RAJA KRISHNAMOORTHI, Illinois JODY B. HICE, Georgia
JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland GLENN GROTHMAN, Wisconsin
RO KHANNA, California MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
KWEISI MFUME, Maryland BOB GIBBS, Ohio
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, New York CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana
RASHIDA TLAIB, Michigan RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
KATIE PORTER, California PETE SESSIONS, Texas
CORI BUSH, Missouri FRED KELLER, Pennsylvania
DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Florida ANDREW CLYDE, Georgia
PETER WELCH, Vermont NANCY MACE, South Carolina
HENRY C. ‘‘HANK’’ JOHNSON, JR., Georgia SCOTT FRANKLIN, Florida
JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland JAKE LATURNER, Kansas
JACKIE SPEIER, California PAT FALLON, Texas
ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois YVETTE HERRELL, New Mexico
BRENDA L. LAWRENCE, Michigan BYRON DONALDS, Florida
MARK DESAULNIER, California
JIMMY GOMEZ, California
AYANNA PRESSLEY, Massachusetts
VACANCY
DAVID RAPALLO, Staff Director
EMILY BURNS, Policy Director
ELISA LANIER, Chief Clerk
CONTACT NUMBER: 202-225-5051
MARK MARIN, Minority Staff Director
(II)
C O N T E N T S
Page
Hearing held on March 2, 2021 .............................................................................. 1
WITNESS
The Honorable Gene L. Dodaro, Comptroller General of the United States,
Government Accountability Office
Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 5
Opening statements and the prepared statement for the witness are available
in the U.S. House of Representatives Repository at: docs.house.gov.
INDEX OF DOCUMENTS
* Letter, Kansas Congressional Delegation; submitted by Rep. LaTurner.
* Report, Kansas Report on Unemployment Claims and Fraud; submitted
by Rep. LaTurner.
* Letter, IRS Enforcement Letter from 88 Groups to the Biden Administra-
tion and Congress; submitted by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
* ‘‘Who’s Afraid of the IRS? Not Facebook,’’ article, Pro Publica; submitted
by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
* Questions for the Record: to Mr. Dodaro; submitted by Rep. LaTurner.
Documents entered into the record during this hearing and Questions for
the Record (QFR’s) are available at: docs.house.gov.
(III)
THE 2021 GAO HIGH-RISK LIST:
BLUEPRINT FOR A SAFER, STRONGER,
MORE EFFECTIVE AMERICA
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM,
Washington, D.C.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:39 a.m., in room
2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Carolyn B. [chair-
woman of the committee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Norton, Lynch, Cooper, Connolly,
Krishnamoorthi, Raskin, Khanna, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Porter,
Bush, Davis, Welch, Johnson, Speier, Kelly, DeSaulnier, Gomez,
Pressley, Comer, Jordan, Gosar, Foxx, Hice, Grothman, Cloud,
Gibbs, Higgins, Keller, Sessions, Biggs, Donalds, Herrell,
LaTurner, Fallon, Clyde, and Franklin.
Chairwoman MALONEY. Welcome, everybody, to today’s hybrid
hearing. Pursuant to House Rules, some members will appear in
person, and others will appear remotely via Webex. Since some
members are appearing in person, let me first remind everyone
that pursuant to the latest guidance from the House attending phy-
sician, all individuals attending this hearing in person must wear
a face mask. Members who are not wearing a face mask will not
be recognized.
Let me also make a few reminders for those members appearing
in person. You will only see members and witnesses appearing re-
motely on the monitor in front of you when they are speaking in
what is known in Webex as ‘‘active speaker’’ or ‘‘stage view.’’ A
timer is visible in the room directly in front of you.
For members appearing remotely, I know you are all familiar
with Webex by now, but let me remind everyone of a few points.
First, you will be able to see each other speaking during the
hearing whether they are in person or remote as long as you have
your Webex set to active speaker or stage view. If you have any
questions about this, please contact staff immediately.
Second, we have a timer that should be visible on your screen
when you are in the active speaker with thumbnail. Members who
wish to pin the timer to their screens should contact committee
staff for assistance.
Third, the House Rules require that we see you. So, please have
your cameras turned on at all times.
Fourth, members appearing remotely who are not recognized
should remain muted to minimize background noise and feedback.
(1)
2
Fifth, I will recognize members verbally, but members retain the
right to seek recognition verbally. In regular order, members will
be recognized in seniority order for questions.
Last, if you want to be recognized outside of regular order, you
may identify that in several ways. You may use the chat function
to send a request, you may send an email to the majority staff, or
you may unmute your mic to seek recognition.
Obviously, we do not want people talking over each other. So, my
preference is that members use the chat function or email to facili-
tate formal verbal recognition. Committee staff will ensure that I
am made aware of the request, and I will recognize you.
We will begin the hearing in just a moment when they tell me
they are ready to begin the live stream.
[Pause.]
Chairwoman MALONEY. The committee will come to order.
Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a recess of
the committee at any time.
I now recognize myself for an opening statement.
The U.S. Government is one of the most complex and consequen-
tial organizations on Earth. Responsible for serving a population of
more than 330 million people and adding a new person at a rate
of every 52 seconds, the Federal Government has a mission that is
staggering in both breadth and depth.
Every two years, the Government Accountability Office releases
a blueprint for how to better meet this mission. The GAO High-
Risk List identifies the areas of Federal operations most in need of
improvement and transformation, complete with hundreds of rat-
ings and specific recommendations for how to achieve progress.
This year’s report is titled ‘‘Dedicated Leadership Needed to Ad-
dress Limited Progress in Most High-Risk Areas,’’ a message that
cuts right to the heart of the challenge we face.
Over the past four years, the objective metrics of the High-Risk
List shows that the Federal Government improved less and re-
gressed more than before the President took office. Of the 35 areas
that were included on the list, 20 were stagnant, five regressed,
and two new areas were added. The country now strives to recover
from an unprecedented pandemic that has killed more than
500,000 Americans and reduced the average life expectancy by one
full year, a toll that falls particularly hard on minority populations.
Fourteen million Americans lost their jobs in the first three
months of the pandemic, more than in two years of the Great Re-
cession. Ten million are still unemployed, and that number doesn’t
even include the millions of Americans who have given up looking
for jobs.
As this silent war rages on in homes and hospitals, another si-
lent battle is being fought in our IT networks by cyber attackers
intent on stealing our intellectual property and undermining our
national security. The SolarWinds breach that came to light last
December as well as escalating targeted cyber attacks that have
drained millions of dollars from struggling hospitals are just two
examples of the threats that we know about.
The economic toll of the pandemic also cuts across multiple high-
risk areas, draining, draining our ability to react and straining our
3
resources and inflicting damage on financial regulatory systems
that remain dangerously fragmented after the last financial crisis.
Our frontline healthcare and essential workers are traumatized
and exhausted, suffering devastation that will redefine a genera-
tion. They will not forget that the Federal Government told them
they were on their own when the ICUs filled up and the personal
protective equipment was nowhere to be found. They will not forget
the Federal Government put more lives at risk by contradicting
basic scientific facts. They will not forget that the Federal Govern-
ment used outdated IT systems that delayed their economic stim-
ulus checks.
I know our Federal Government is better than that. As one of
our colleagues reminded me a few weeks ago, our Federal Govern-
ment put a man on the Moon. So, setting up a functioning system
for distributing pandemic relief payments quickly and accurately
should be entirely attainable.
It is attainable, as are the other recommendations in today’s
high-risk report, but it will take dedicated leadership to get there
and not just by one person. No one person can rebuild the broken
roads, prevent the next flood, or stop the next deadly virus from
ravaging our cities and towns. No one person can remove the lead
from the water, cover payroll costs for pandemic-starved small
businesses, or save the 136 Americans who will die of opioid
overdoses today.
No one person can do all these things, but when we all work to-
gether as effectively as possible, we can make progress. That is the
work of Government and the work of today’s report.
The committee is honored to welcome Gene Dodaro, the Comp-
troller General of the United States and the head of the Govern-
ment Accountability Office. The diligent and thorough work under-
taken by Mr. Dodaro and his staff of dedicated professionals com-
plements the mission of this committee, and we are grateful for it.
The need for an effective, efficient, functional, and responsible
Federal Government has never been greater. Congress and the ex-
ecutive branch must work together strategically on high-risk areas
so Federal agencies are in the best position possible to restore the
health, security, and prosperity of the Nation.
Comptroller General, thank you for being here today, and I look
forward to a wide-ranging discussion.
Before I recognize the ranking member, I want to make one an-
nouncement. Mr. Dodaro is testifying in the Senate this afternoon
at 2:30 p.m., which means we will have to end our hearing at 1:30
p.m.
With that, I now recognize the distinguished ranking member,
Mr. Comer, for an opening statement.
Mr. COMER. Thank you, Madam Chair, for holding this very im-
portant hybrid, bipartisan hearing.
And thank you, Comptroller General Dodaro, for your appear-
ance here today. I know you are going to have a very long day.
Today’s hearing is exactly what this committee was designed to
do, explore areas where there are high risks of fraud, waste, abuse,
and mismanagement of Government resources. Congress needs to
know what steps we can take to make the high-risk programs more
efficient and less susceptible to misuse.
4
Taxpayers expect the Government to work for them, but far too
often, the complexity of the Federal bureaucracy leads to risks of
inefficiencies and mismanaged resources. I am glad the hearing
today will shine a light on Federal programs that are especially
susceptible to such risks, as well as identify solutions to ensure
that the Government is working for the American people.
GAO’s High-Risk List has informed congressional oversight and
decisionmaking since its inception in the 1990’s. To be included on
the list, the GAO considers several factors, in particular whether
the area presents a risk of at least $1 billion loss, involves public
health, safety, national security, economic growth, or citizens’
rights.
The 36 separate areas identified in the 2021 High-Risk List are
selected by GAO as having both qualitative and quantitative risks
that present an elevated likelihood of fraud, waste, and abuse.
Once on the list, the program must demonstrate a commitment to
progress in five criteria, which GAO clearly outlines.
Today’s hearing should help us better understand these rec-
ommendations so this committee can use the tools to ensure these
programs are better managed. The GAO estimates the High-Risk
List, combined with targeted congressional oversight, is responsible
for a financial benefit to the Federal Government of $575 billion
over the last 15 years and approximately $225 billion since its last
high-risk update in 2019. That is over half a trillion dollars saved
for the U.S. taxpayers over the last 15 years.
But there remains serious work to be done in addressing many
of the deficiencies identified on the 2021 High-Risk List. In fact, I
see this report as a blueprint for congressional action needed to
make our Government work more efficiently for the American peo-
ple, while managing resources and utilizing our tax dollars in the
way that the law intends. Because despite progress made in mul-
tiple high-risk areas since 2019, the news is not all good. Only one
area met all five criteria for removal from this year’s High-Risk
List, while two new areas were added to the list. Some areas re-
gressed, while others did not improve in any of the five criteria.
There is still a significant amount of work to be done, and I have
said many times that this committee should be guided by its mis-
sion to root out waste, fraud, and abuse wherever it may be found.
I am glad to see the committee finally addressing these issues.
Since October, committee Republicans have shined a light on a
$35 million contract to a get out the vote effort in California that
appears to violate Federal law. Meanwhile, the Election Assistance
Commissioner Inspector General has taken no action. That is ex-
actly why it is important for this committee to focus on preventing
mismanagement and frivolous spending like we are here today.
That is our job on this committee.
I look forward to hearing from our witness today about ways
Congress can enhance its oversight and improve the areas identi-
fied on the High-Risk List to ensure that our Government works
on behalf of the American people.
Again, I thank the chairwoman for holding this important hear-
ing, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Chairwoman MALONEY. Thank you. The gentleman yields back.
5
I would now like to introduce our witness. Today, we will hear
from the Honorable Gene Dodaro, who is the Comptroller General
of the United States.
The witness will be unmuted so we can swear him in. Please
raise your right hand.
Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to give
is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help
you God?
[Response.]
Chairwoman MALONEY. Let the record show that the witness an-
swered in the affirmative.
Thank you. Without objection, your written statement will be
part of the record.
With that, Comptroller Dodaro, you are now recognized for your
testimony.
STATEMENT OF HON. GENE L. DODARO, COMPTROLLER GEN-
ERAL OF THE UNITED STATES, GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT-
ABILITY OFFICE
Mr. DODARO. Thank you very much, Chairwoman Maloney,
Ranking Member Comer, members of the committee. I’m very
pleased to have this opportunity to talk about GAO’s latest high-
risk update today.
There have been some bright spots and improvement. However,
our overall conclusion is that there has been limited progress in the
majority of the high-risk areas. Twenty, as you mentioned, Chair-
woman Maloney, have remained the same with their ratings. Five
have regressed.
Now on the positive side, seven areas made improvements in
their ratings. One to the point, as Ranking Member Comer men-
tioned, of coming off the list. That’s the defense support infrastruc-
ture area. They reduced their warehouse, office space, properties;
reduced their leasing costs, as we recommended; taken action to
get intergovernmental agreements in place to reduce their costs of
operating their bases. And so we feel comfortable.
Now when we take something off the list, that doesn’t mean it’s
out of sight. So, we keep an eye on the area to make sure that it
is, in fact, fixed.
And now on the other side of the equation, we’re adding two new
areas to the High-Risk List. The first is the Federal Government’s
efforts to prevent, respond to, and recover from drug abuse. Unfor-
tunately, from 2002 to 2019, 800,000 Americans have lost their
lives to drug overdose. The latest period from May 1919 to 1920—
May 1920 has the highest recorded number of deaths already, on
a preliminary basis, of 80,000 people.
This area needs greater Federal leadership, attention, coordina-
tion, and a complete national strategy that’s executed properly,
monitored, and refined going forward to combat this—another pub-
lic health crisis that we’re facing in addition to the pandemic.
Second, we’re adding SBA’s Emergency Loan Program. Now
these loan programs have been a tremendous help to small busi-
nesses across the United States during the pandemic, and I want
to emphasize that this designation does not detract from the good
that these programs have done. However, we think, when you’re
6
spending close to $1 trillion, you also need good accountability and
transparency. And by those standards, these programs have not
met that goal.
There is need for greater oversight and management for program
integrity to minimize fraud and to provide better accountability to
the taxpayer. SBA was unable to get an opinion from its financial
auditors this past year because they couldn’t substantiate loan bal-
ances and other issues.
Now there are a number of existing high-risk areas that I want
to call your attention to. First is the cybersecurity of our Nation.
I first designated this a high-risk area across the entire Federal
Government in 1997. We added critical infrastructure protection in
2003. The Federal Government is still not operating, in my opinion,
at a pace commensurate with the evolving serious threats that are
presented in this area. So, we’ve put forth a number of rec-
ommendations.
Second is the Federal workforce. There are critical skill gaps.
Twenty-two of the high-risk areas are on there in part because of
skill gap in the programs. And the Federal Government is, in my
view, not well postured as it needs to be to meet 21st century chal-
lenges.
This committee is very familiar with the high-risk issues in the
U.S. Postal Service and Census. So, I won’t go into those in much
detail.
Limiting the Federal Government’s fiscal exposure by managing
climate risk is a very important issue. The Government is an in-
surer of flood insurance, crop insurance. It is the biggest property
owner in the United States and land owner. It needs to limit dis-
aster aid that’s now over $1 trillion—or a half trillion dollars since
Katrina took place by building better resilience in up front.
So, the bottom line here is that only 12 of the high-risk areas
have had leadership met as part of the criteria. So, we need much
greater leadership on the part of the agencies, OMB, and continued
oversight and engagement from the Congress. GAO is ready to do
its part to help.
Thank you very much. I’d be happy to answer questions.
Chairwoman MALONEY. Thank you. I recognize myself for five
minutes for questions.
Last Friday, our committee had a hearing on the SolarWinds
breach and received really frightening testimony about how a sus-
pected Russian state actor infiltrated the networks of at least nine
Federal agencies and over 100 private sector companies, stealing
their intellectual property, their plans, their research. Definitely a
national security risk.
Our attackers wreaked silent, invisible damage on our internal
Federal networks for months undetected and would have remained
undetected for who knows how long if not for the discovery by the
cybersecurity firm FireEye. The vulnerability of Federal and pri-
vate sector systems, including critical infrastructure of the Nation’s
energy, transportation, communications, and financial sector, is ab-
solutely staggering.
So, Mr. Dodaro, in the high-risk area of ensuring the cybersecu-
rity of the Nation, how many of GAO’s recommendations currently
stand open to secure cybersecurity?
7
You need your mic on.
Mr. DODARO. Since 2010, we’ve made 3,300 recommendations.
Seven hundred fifty remain open at this point in time.
Chairwoman MALONEY. And how many would you describe as
priority recommendations?
Mr. DODARO. There’s about 67 priority recommendations remain-
ing open. But I would underscore that all 750 can introduce
vulnerabilities if not attended to.
Chairwoman MALONEY. This is unbelievably unacceptable. Which
of these recommendations would have been most important in pre-
venting or responding to the SolarWinds attack?
Mr. DODARO. There were two in particular. One dealing with the
information technology supply chain. There are best practices that
could be put in place to address that issue. We warned about it be-
fore, but we took an in-depth look. None of the 23 agencies that we
looked at met all the best practice criteria. So, we made 145 rec-
ommendations across Government to better manage IT supply
chain issues, which was a key weakness exploited during the
SolarWinds attack.
Second is to—and I’m pleased that Congress has acted on this
recommendation, which is to place a statutory cyber coordinator in
the White House that can coordinate activities across Government
to support the Department of Homeland Security, to support OMB,
and the agencies in the bridge to civilian and military components,
along with the National Security Council. So, this is—this is an im-
portant area. So far, that position has not yet been filled, however.
Chairwoman MALONEY. Now if your recommendations had been
in place, do you think it would have prevented this cyber attack?
Mr. DODARO. Well, it certainly would have led to an earlier dis-
covery of the attack. It’s hard to say that, you know, you can’t have
zero assurance. But we would have been better postured to detect
the attack ourselves, to take quicker action, in my opinion.
Chairwoman MALONEY. In response to your statement, if you
turn to page 168 of the report, which states—and I quote—about
the need to coordinate with a cybersecurity professional, ‘‘In light
of the elimination of the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator
position in May 2018, it had remained unclear what official within
the executive branch is to ultimately be responsible for coordi-
nating the execution of the implementation plan and holding Fed-
eral agencies accountable for the plan’s nearly 200 activities mov-
ing forward.’’
So, Mr. Dodaro, GAO’s assessment that the Trump administra-
tion’s decision to eliminate the White House Cybersecurity Coordi-
nator position, do you believe that that made the Nation more vul-
nerable to cyber attack?
Mr. DODARO. Well, I’m very pleased that the Congress created
the position in statute, and I think having the position filled will
help reduce the Government’s vulnerability, if effectively imple-
mented and the proper leadership provided across Government.
Chairwoman MALONEY. OK, and I think that the report later dis-
cusses the attack and stresses that this national cyber director
needs to be filled. We support that. We passed it legislatively. It
was removed by the White House, and it has to be put forward, a
8
national cyber strategy needing a national director focused on all
of your recommendations.
I want to really point on something that came out of the hearing,
and that was the need to share information. And I know that there
has been legislation in calling for the sharing of information be-
tween the public and private sector on cyber attacks. There has
been great resistance. Many people don’t want to share that infor-
mation. They don’t want people to know that they had a breach,
but this information has to be shared.
And I want to know what your assessment would be if we re-
quired—we have, what, $1.5 trillion a year in Federal contracts
that go out. That if you receive a Federal contract, then you must
share that information with Government and the private sector so
that we can better address attacks to our cybersecurity. Would you
support that type of legislation requiring as part of a Federal con-
tract, if you are receiving Federal money for research and you are
breached, then you have to share that breach with the Federal
Government and colleagues in the private sector to better combat
it?
Mr. DODARO. That type of provision would be very helpful, Chair-
woman Maloney. I appreciate that.
You know, 80 percent of the computing assets in this country are
in private sector hands. So, we can’t effectively combat this issue
without sharing between the private sector and the Government
sector. Now there’s reluctance to do that for liability reasons, for
business reasons, but we have to do it in a confidential manner,
where we can have and share this information both from the com-
panies being affected, but also from the Government standpoint
about threats that they’re aware of that they should warn the pri-
vate sector about because they have unique resources in Govern-
ment that the private sector doesn’t have.
But so far, we’re not at that point of having enough fluidity in
the sharing of this information to have an integrated, coordinated
effort to protect our Nation. And I’m hopeful that the Cybersecurity
Coordinator can help—once that’s filled, help build trust and build
mechanisms to more effectively share this information.
Chairwoman MALONEY. Another thing that came out of that
hearing was how vast the amount of information they could receive
from the nine Federal agencies and some of the most important
businesses in our country, leading businesses and leading agencies
and technology that is vital for the survival of our country. Yet
they got into one system and was able to go and climb into systems
throughout the Government.
And it seems to me we should study how you firewall it. Maybe
the Government should not be connected to a system connected to
the private sector. In the breaches that I have seen, most of them
come in through the private sector and into Government through
a connecting system. And I would like some research in that area
of how we would firewall off defense, energy, areas that are critical
to the infrastructure of our country.
I want to thank you. I have been on this committee many years,
and one of my favorite hearings is this one, when you focus on the
needs of what we need to do to make our country stronger and
more responsive to the people that we serve.
9
With that, I now recognize the gentleman from Arizona, Mr.
Gosar. You are now recognized, Mr. Gosar.
Mr. HICE. Madam Chairwoman? Madam Chairwoman?
Chairwoman MALONEY. Yes.
Mr. HICE. Are we all going to be able to get nine minutes of ques-
tioning?
Chairwoman MALONEY. Yes, you can. Mr. Comer has it or who-
ever he designates it to. This is one of the most important hearings
that we have in our committee. It points out what needs to be done
to protect our people and to make our country stronger, and I am
going to be extremely lenient on the questions because we have the
head here to give us direction, and we need to hear his comments
and the questions.
So, I am going to be very liberal on questioning because we need
to get these answers. But I have been told to call on Mr. Gosar.
Is that correct?
Mr. COMER. Yes, yes.
Chairwoman MALONEY. And I will allow him eight minutes if he
wants, or whatever. Mr. Gosar, you are now recognized.
Mr. GOSAR. Thank you, Chairwoman.
And I totally agree with you. This is one of the most important
hearings that we have in this committee.
We are here to talk about the GAO’s 2021 High-Risk List, which
highlights major agency assets that have been either lost, stolen,
damaged, wasted, or underutilized. There are a lot of programs you
can dive into on this report, but there is something I want to focus
on first.
Mr. Dodaro, what if we were to tell you there is a massive Gov-
ernment program out there that is ripe‘ with abuse? This program
undercuts Americans seeking work in the STEM field by allowing
businesses to hire foreign workers at a discounted rate. This pro-
grams allows these discounts by ensuring these foreign workers
don’t have to contribute to FICA, which is the Social Security and
Medicare taxes.
This program also allows those same individuals the ability to
withdraw from Social Security and Medicare even though they
don’t contribute. As I am sure you are aware, this is extremely
problematic since Social Security will be insolvent by 2035 and
Medicare by 2026. Oh, no, I take that back. Now that we have new
actuarials, Medicare is insolvent by 2024.
This program was also not approved by Congress and actually
doesn’t have a cap. Currently, no one knows how many individuals
are on this program. Do you know of the program I am talking
about? Because it didn’t make it into your report.
Mr. DODARO. I think you’re talking about the—there’s a visa in-
vestor program where people can come in and invest?
Mr. GOSAR. No. The program is called the Optional Practical
Training Program, also known as the OPT. This program was cre-
ated by a rogue Department of Homeland Security in 2008 and has
lasting impacts. Not only is this program reprioritizing Americans
last in regards to Social Security and Medicare, two programs they
have been paying in their whole lives, but also those graduating in
the STEM field.
10
Imagine being a young person nowadays going to college. Media,
society, and even Members of Congress tell youngsters the impor-
tance of getting a degree in STEM. They go on to say how there
is a massive shortage, so there is a great window for you to build
a great career.
You spend years completing your degree, and then you hit the
job market just to be told that since you are an American, there
are no—they have no interest in hiring you because they can hire
a foreign worker for less with the same credentials, and then less
money is charged them. Is it really a mystery that the Bureau of
Labor Statistics found that for every two students graduating with
a U.S. STEM degree, only one is employed in STEM? And that 32
percent of computer science graduates not employed in information
technology attributed their situation to a lack of available jobs.
Mr. Dodaro, I suggest GAO adds this program to its list of high-
risk programs because, in my opinion and in the opinion of many
others, this is a program that needs to be highlighted and ad-
dressed as abusive and ultimately bad for Americans.
Shifting gears slightly, Mr. Dodaro, I am hoping that you can
shed some light on the deficiencies related to the Pentagon’s finan-
cial management. As you are aware, Pentagon bookkeeping is noto-
riously abysmal. In fact, DOD bookkeeping is so abysmal that
areas within the DOD have been in the high-risk report since 1995.
These failures are evident and materialize every year when DOD
inevitably fails in its annual audit. On November 16, 2020, the
Pentagon announced for the third straight year, it failed its finan-
cial review. The DOD estimates that it will not be able to pass an
audit before 2027, or 37 years after it was required to do so by law.
According to your report, the DOD uses their reporting tools to
produce reports for high-level decisionmaking and reporting based
on real-time data contained in its centralized data base. This tool
enables DOD to produce reports on the status of audit findings and
its efforts to address audit priority areas and material weaknesses.
Your report also goes on to say that ‘‘The data base information
may be inaccurate, unreliable, and incomplete for management de-
cisionmaking’’ and that ‘‘Without complete and reliable information
on DOD’s audit remediation efforts, internal and external stake-
holders may not have quality information to effectively monitor and
measure DOD’s progress.’’
Yet every year, Congress fails to hold DOD accountable for these
deficiencies during the appropriations process. We continue to dis-
tribute duties and responsibilities to various existing positions with
less and less authority. While we must compete with our adver-
saries, we cannot ignore these deficiencies. In fact, I would argue
that these deficiencies hinder our efforts to maintain a strategic ad-
vantage over our adversaries.
So, Mr. Dodaro, why is the Pentagon estimating that it will not
be able to pass an audit before 2027?
Mr. DODARO. One of the reasons, Congressman Gosar, is that for
many years, I’d say almost 20, 25 years, DOD did not have a very
good process in place and take this requirement for a financial
audit very seriously, and Congress waived the requirement for
them for a number of years in order to get their systems in place,
which never happened.
11
So, the past three or four years have been the best I’ve seen, and
I’ve been monitoring this the whole 30-year period, where DOD is
finally serious about having a financial audit done. They’ve cor-
rected 25, 26 percent of all the weaknesses that have been identi-
fied.
So, basically, the reason is they got a very late start. Their sys-
tems are antiquated. They need to make sure that they have more
financial management personnel that are qualified and trained.
That’s one of the 22 areas on the list because of the need for closing
skill gaps. And they need to fix these problems and to consolidate
and modernize their financial systems.
My hope is, if this progress is sustained, that they will get there
ultimately because this is the one area in the Federal Government
of the 24 largest departments and agencies that have never been
able to pass the test of an independent audit, and it’s needed.
The other thing I would point out is they’re already beginning to
realize millions of dollars of savings as a result of doing the finan-
cial audit by identifying property and equipment that was not on
their books that they can then use rather than reorder new equip-
ment. So, it’s already having very good benefits, and I think that
will help sustain the progress.
But you’re right to point it out, and I think I would encourage
Congress to keep monitoring the progress there very carefully.
Mr. GOSAR. Is some of the issues in regards to this audit sole-
sourcing contracts?
Mr. DODARO. I don’t know. I will get you an answer for the
record there. I believe there were competitive—competed. But I’m
not sure and—but I will find out and get an answer to you.
Mr. GOSAR. Thank you. Then also in that contract base, is it of
question, the calibration in regard to Davis Bacon wages?
Mr. DODARO. I don’t believe that applies to the financial audit,
no.
Mr. GOSAR. But it does to DOD regards to fair and compensate
contracting, does it not?
Mr. DODARO. Well, it does in regard to construction projects and
other things, but I’m not sure it applies to professional services.
But I’ll get you—again, I’ll get you a more definitive answer on
that.
Mr. GOSAR. OK. One last question. What can we do, as Congress,
in the Fiscal Year 2022 NDAA to accelerate the timeline for a suc-
cessful Pentagon-wide audit? What can we do to put the carrot and
the stick so that we actually get that compliance?
I mean, 25 percent is pretty pathetic. And thank you for at least
getting that. But I mean, we can’t fully understand the ramifica-
tions unless we have the full information. So, what can we do to
make your job better?
Mr. DODARO. I think you can continue to ask DOD for their plan
to modernize their systems to get at the underlying cause for the
problems and to make sure that Congress gives them funding to
bring in all the qualified people that they need in order to fix these
problems. That would—that’s the key to expediting progress. That’s
how it’s happened across the rest of the Federal Government.
Mr. GOSAR. Isn’t it the purpose of the Antideficiency Act to do
exactly that, that Congress appropriate their funds for the specific
12
purpose and that DOD has to spend those funds accordingly to that
purpose?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. But the Antideficiency Fund makes sure that
the agencies don’t spend more than what Congress gave them to.
I mean, so it’s basically the Empowerment Control Act is the one
that makes sure that they spend it for the purposes that the Con-
gress intended it to do.
Now you asked me what Congress could do to help, and I—and
of something that they could place in the NDAA, and I think it is
requirements for them to provide good plans for improving their
systems and to encourage them to have all the qualified people
they need would be good steps for Congress to take.
Mr. GOSAR. Thank you. I yield back, Chairwoman.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. The gentle-
woman from the District of Columbia, Ms. Norton, is recognized.
Ms. Norton?
Ms. NORTON. Thank you, Madam Chair. Can you hear me well?
Chairwoman MALONEY. Yes, we can.
Ms. NORTON. I appreciate this hearing. I believe we have this
hearing annually, and this High-Risk List keeps appearing before
us.
I must tell you, Madam Chair, that before being elected to Con-
gress, I was a tenured professor of law. I recognize failure when I
see it. So, I would like to discuss changing our approach in at least
some ways.
As I looked at this list and I considered my own responsibilities
and the committees on which I serve, I thought one way to go with
this is to look for win-win opportunities when it comes to high-risk
areas. And so I looked for such areas where you have the same in-
vestment because that is going to be an issue. Money is always an
issue. And the same, time and resources.
And the reason I am looking at a win-win is because of my serv-
ice on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and we
have just gotten a bill in the reconciliation package. And it is, of
course, one of the high-risk areas that I think presents us with an
opportunity for a win-win.
So, my question for Mr. Dodaro is, first as I understand it, I be-
lieve you have just testified in response to a question from one of
my colleagues that 80 percent of the—of this issue is in private
hands. Is that not the case?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. So, in talking about computing, the computing
assets, yes.
Ms. NORTON. So, progress in this area hinges really on congres-
sional action, the action we take. We in the Congress takes. Is that
correct?
Mr. DODARO. That’s part of the issue, but the executive branch
needs to execute as well and to gain the cooperation of the private
sector, particularly for critical infrastructure protection.
Ms. NORTON. That is where I want to go, to critical infrastruc-
ture protection, because the President, President Biden, has before
us a Build Back Better agenda that would invest $2 trillion to im-
prove the Nation’s infrastructure and surface transportation sys-
tem. That is of special interest to me because of the committee on
which I serve. I also know that the American Society of Civil Engi-
13
neers reports that 1 out of every 5 miles of highway pavement in
the U.S. is in poor condition.
So, then I looked at infrastructure itself because of my interest
in that area. That The Build Back Better plan would electrify var-
ious forms of surface transportation. I think we are already begin-
ning to see electric cars or electric transportation, surface transpor-
tation, here in my own district, in the District of Columbia.
It would electrify various forms of surface transportation, and
that would include, of course, the kind of surface transportation
that is used every day, like commuter trains and school buses,
transit buses, ferries, passenger vehicles. All of that is on the hori-
zon, while allocating flexible Federal investments to enable munici-
palities to install high-rail networks and improve existing transit.
So, looking forward, Mr. Dodaro, would infrastructure improve-
ments create jobs and cut emissions as a prudent investment to ad-
dress multiple high-risk areas all at one time?
Mr. DODARO. I think it’s very important that we, as a country,
invest in our infrastructure. The surface transportation infrastruc-
ture area has been on our High-Risk List for over 13 years. We
need to have the type of financing and support available for im-
proving surface transportation. In the cyber area, we’ve made rec-
ommendations that there need to be more investment in the elec-
tricity grid and other areas to build in better resilience to those
areas.
So, there’s a wide range of needs in the infrastructure area. It
would directly address some of the areas on the High-Risk List
and, I think, you know would be most appropriate.
Ms. NORTON. Thank you very much.
And there you have it, Madam Chairman—Madam Chair, a win-
win matter for us to consider, rather than coming back every year
to repeat our failures.
I yield back.
Chairwoman MALONEY. I agree. The gentleman from Georgia,
Mr. Hice, is recognized for five minutes.
Mr. HICE. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And thank you, Mr. Dodaro, for being here with us again today.
Isn’t it true that there are several programs that have been on
the list ever since the High-Risk List was implemented back in
1990, I believe?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. There are 5 charter members remaining of the
14 that were on the list at that point. They’re some of the biggest
programs in the Government—weapon systems acquisition, Medi-
care, for example.
Mr. HICE. Right. And not only are those founding members, as
you say, but we have a lot of other veteran members that have
been on since the late 1990’s or early 2000’s as well.
Is there any kind of repercussion, such as withholding certain
amounts of funds, money that they can receive or any other type
of repercussion for agencies or agency organizations that remain on
the High-Risk List year after year after year?
Mr. DODARO. Nothing other than what Congress may impose on
individual areas. For example, the DOD infrastructure support
area we’ve taken off the list this time, Congress required regular
hearings where they had DOD come up. They had GAO continue
14
to investigate in it. And Congress stayed on them with require-
ments in the National Defense Authorization Act until it was im-
proved.
So, congressional oversight and actions. In some cases in the
past, there’s been funds withheld for modernization efforts until
they develop proper plans and institutions. There’s no sort of ge-
neric——
Mr. HICE. I get that, and you are spot on. There is no question
the role of Government oversight. But I am wondering from a legis-
lative perspective to ensure—if there is ramifications? Everyone
works off incentives. Our free markets work off incentives, and
where there are incentives to improve, people tend to improve. But
if there are no incentives to do so, then people, organizations—in
this case, organizational groups stay on the High-Risk List year
after year after year.
Would there be wisdom in having some sort of incentive program
or ramifications for these agencies to get off the list?
Mr. DODARO. Whatever incentives could be craft—crafted would
be helpful.
Mr. HICE. OK.
Mr. DODARO. But in crafting of them, they’d have to be careful
because some of them provide essential services to people, and you
wouldn’t want to interfere with Medicare payments, you know, for
people in need of healthcare——
Mr. HICE. Sure.
Mr. DODARO [Continuing]. Inappropriately. But there—so you’d
have to tailor the incentives, and you know, it’d be better if there
were positive incentives, but if there are incentives that—or the
things you want to put in as penalty type of things, that has to be
carefully crafted.
Mr. HICE. Right. And that is a point well taken.
But at the end of the day, I mean, don’t we have to ask ourselves
what is the effectiveness of having a High-Risk List if there is no
incentive for agencies to get off it? I mean, what are we ultimately
accomplishing? Just it is almost like this has become the norm for
certain agencies just to be on there every year.
Mr. DODARO. Well, as pointed out earlier, in the last 15 years,
the financial benefits have been over $575 billion. So, we’ve
saved—you know, there’s been a lot of progress in saving some of
them money.
Mr. HICE. For those agencies that have responded.
Mr. DODARO. Well, even—even some that are on the list. I mean,
some of the biggest savings, for example, have come in the weapon
systems area, where they’ve reduced the cost growth.
Mr. HICE. Right.
Mr. DODARO. And in the Medicaid program by making some of
the demonstration projects now budget—they’re supposed to be
budget neutral, budget neutral or not. So, that’s been $10 billion.
So, a lot of the financial benefits come from programs that are
still on the list that are making incremental progress. They don’t
come from——
Mr. HICE. OK, I get you. But we still have a long ways to go,
obviously, when looking at all this?
Mr. DODARO. Oh, no, clearly. Yes.
15
Mr. HICE. I am going to try to stay within my five minutes. So,
let me just ask you this one other question that has really been on
my mind. Is there any relationship between IT modernization and
these agencies that stay on the High-Risk List? In other words,
those that year after year after year are on this list, are they also
primarily the ones who are failing to modernize their IT?
Mr. DODARO. There are clearly cases of that. It’s not universal.
One primary case would be the Veterans Administration, both in
healthcare, acquisition management, and other areas. The DOD fi-
nancial management area, we just talked about. So, there clearly
is an interrelationship between a lack of ability to modernize.
There’s a relationship in the high-risk areas. These legacy systems
are a millstone around the neck of the Federal Government from
a security standpoint.
Mr. HICE. Right.
Mr. DODARO. And many of them are 40, 50 years old, and they
were never developed with security concerns in place. So, there’s
interrelationship between IT and the cyber areas.
Mr. HICE. That may be one area we could look.
Mr. DODARO. That’s definitely a fruitful area to pursue, Con-
gressman.
Mr. HICE. OK. All right. Thank you very much.
I yield back.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. The gen-
tleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Lynch, is recognized. Mr. Lynch?
Mr. LYNCH. Thank you, Madam Chair and to the ranking mem-
ber.
Welcome back, Gene. Good to see you. Thank you for your great
work and for the work of your team.
As the chair has said, this hearing is one of the most valuable
I think for Congress to focus on this High-Risk List, and you have
really been very helpful in getting us to focus when we have got
so many issues that are out there that need to be addressed.
Now DOD in 2020 was slated to spend about $1.8 trillion in tax-
payer money to acquire about 106 different weapon systems. And
what really concerned me deeply is that the level of vulnerability
we have, because these weapon systems are so, so complex, and we
could talk about, you know, our satellite system, the hypersonic
weapon systems, the F–35, you know, the Aegis Destroyer systems.
All of it is heavily dependent on software, on cybersecurity in order
to optimize the value to the warfighter.
So, what I am concerned about, and this is especially relevant
after the SolarWinds hack, you mentioned in your report—and I
will quote from the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation.
He said that nearly every warfighting and business capability is
now software-defined. Simply put, the systems, whether it is the
missile system or ships or the F–35, all of that is dependent and
doesn’t work if the software doesn’t work. And we are likely to up-
grade a system by installing new software than by replacing hard-
ware.
However, in your report—and I am thankful for it—your most re-
cent high-risk report, the Director also reported that the Depart-
ment ‘‘lacked testing personnel with deep cybersecurity expertise.’’
The Director also stated that, ‘‘Without substantial improvements
16
to cybersecurity test and evaluation, especially in the workforce,
DOD risks lowering the overall force readiness and lethality’’ of our
weapon systems.
So, can you talk about that aspect of your report? Because I
think, look, the costs are completely out of control, and the sched-
ules, we are falling years and years behind on some of these com-
plex systems. And even the asymmetry of the threat environment
out there, you know, a handful of good hackers can keep thousands
of our people on the defensive end busy just trying to protect
against that small group. So, if you could talk about that aspect of
your report, I would appreciate it.
Thank you.
Mr. DODARO. Yes. A few years ago, we started looking at the
focus the DOD had on cybersecurity and developing new weapon
systems, and they really weren’t focused on it very well. When they
did look into it, it showed extraordinary vulnerabilities. And so we
became concerned. So, we’ve looked more at it. We made some rec-
ommendations, and they’re gradually improving.
But they’re not to the point of where they need to be in the de-
velopment of new weapon systems going forward. So, we’re watch-
ing that very carefully. It’s very concerning, and this is true of
many critical functions. Not only the DOD, but in the private sec-
tor and elsewhere, because most things now, our industrial control
systems, everything is software dependent or connected to the
Internet that would have problems. So, this is problems that we
see as well in the GPS systems.
Mr. LYNCH. Is this a pipeline problem where we are not devel-
oping the personnel to do this work, or is it the private sector is
siphoning away all the good talent with better salaries and things
like that so that from a personnel standpoint we are having a dif-
ficult time competing?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Well, there’s definitely that element to it, and
I’ll ask Nick Marinos, our cybersecurity expert who looked at the
workforce issues. But I think you have multiple facets of it. You
definitely don’t have enough people to provide services to both the
private sector and the Government. So, we need to increase the
pipeline. There’s no question about that.
Mr. LYNCH. Yes.
Mr. DODARO. And a number of universities now are starting to
have cybersecurity programs. University of Maryland has one. I’ve
met with the professors there. We were actually in the classrooms
giving case examples in how you could—and we’re pulling people
in from the Government. So, and I work with Virginia Tech and
some other places.
So, we’ve got to increase the pipeline. We’ll never be competitive
in the Government for services from the private sector in this
arena. So, we use contractors a lot, which is fine, and we’re going
to have to use contractors to help. But the Government has got to
have an ability to oversee the contractors effectively and to have
the patience and the discipline necessary to make sure that these
areas are attended to before they rush into production.
That’s the biggest problem we’ve seen is where they want—the
technology is not mature enough, including cybersecurity, but other
parts of maturity in the technology before we want to rush it into
17
production. So, that’s an area where, you know, congressional in-
tention is important, but we have to increase the size of the work-
force in the United States. And whatever can be done in that area
I think is terribly important.
Mr. LYNCH. Well, I thank you for your service and your assist-
ance in this matter.
And Madam Chair, I yield back. Thank you.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. The gen-
tleman from Ohio, Mr. Gibbs? You are now recognized, Mr. Gibbs.
Mr. GIBBS. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And thank you for being here today.
Let us talk a little about the Post Office. The Postal Service has
lost $87 billion over the past 14 fiscal years, including $9.2 billion
in Fiscal Year 2020. Is that correct?
Mr. DODARO. That sounds about right.
Mr. GIBBS. And they expect to lose about $9.7 billion in Fiscal
Year 2021. Given the serious financial disaster looming at the Post-
al Service—and also their service has, you know, just gone to pot—
wouldn’t you agree that congressional action is urgently needed to
bring reform and that mere half measures and band-aids would be
unacceptable?
Mr. DODARO. Absolutely. I have testimoneys dating back several
years that have Congress needs to urgently act on the Postal Serv-
ice. So, I’d certainly believe it now. I’ve believed it for a while.
Mr. GIBBS. If Congress addresses the prefunding of Medicare in-
tegration, would that be enough to permanently fix the Postal Serv-
ice financial situation, or would it just make the balance sheet look
better at the time?
Mr. DODARO. It would—it wouldn’t fix the underlying business
model problem, no. It would help alleviate some of the current fis-
cal stress, but not fix the fundamental——
Mr. GIBBS. So, we also have to implement operational and struc-
tural reforms?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Yes, you need structural reforms.
Mr. GIBBS. Does your agency suggest any structural reforms
or——
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Yes.
Mr. GIBBS. Can you specify?
Mr. DODARO. Well, we think—I mean, the fundamental issue
here is you have a business model that’s completely broken. It’s
been disrupted by technology, and that’s been accelerated by the
pandemic. And it accelerated during the global financial crisis
where first-class mail is dropping, which is where they had a com-
petitive advantage, you know? They were basically a monopoly
from that standpoint.
And the Congress has expected them to operate like a business,
but the model is broken. So, there has to be a determination here
because nobody wants to give up some of the services that the Post-
al Service is providing—six-day delivery, universal coverage, rural
area coverage, and other areas. And our recommendation, there
needs to be an agreement within the Congress about what services
do you really want, and does the model where you have a Postal
Service that’s supposed to operate like a private sector really the
model that you want? Or do you want something like that, but
18
there’s a—there’s a commitment by the Congress to provide addi-
tional funding there, too, to have a floor of service required.
So, you need to figure out what services you want to provide,
how you want to pay for them, and then structure a governance
structure and an organization that fits that on a sustainable basis
going forward.
Mr. GIBBS. Last week, Postmaster General DeJoy testified, and
of course, he is working on reforms. And one thing I questioned—
I was concerned about is in their reforms and their projections
going out I think it was 10 years, they are projecting more volume.
And what would you think, are they going to actually have more
volume?
Obviously, the economy grows and everything else, but we are
seeing what is happening in the private sector, the Amazons of the
world. Do you think it is prudent for them to base their projections
on a significantly increased volume that they will be handling, or
is that something they should not be doing?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Well, I haven’t—we haven’t looked at their
projections lately. I’d be happy to do so. But I mean, my offhand
reaction to that is that you don’t want to be overly optimistic be-
cause in the package area, they have competition. And the competi-
tion has been moving out, and they rely on the post office particu-
larly in rural areas, where it’s not cost effective. But where it’s cost
effective, those companies are moving in that area and are having
services—Amazon and others—delivering their own packages and
things.
Mr. GIBBS. I totally agree with you. There is competition in the
packages. That is obvious. But I would also argue that the competi-
tion might even be even greater in the first-class postage because
of the use of online, Internet. I told him last week that I refuse to
mail a check in the mail anymore because I don’t have confidence
in the system.
And so I think they are going to have more first class is, you
know——
Mr. DODARO. Well, I think you’re going to—you have a genera-
tion now, as the generations age, they’re not using mail. I mean,
even my children don’t even check their mail that often, you know,
because they’re using text and they’re using other things.
Mr. GIBBS. I certainly agree, and I made that point. I’m a baby
boomer, and I look at the millennials and the Generation Zs. If I
am doing this as a baby boomer trying to not use the mail because
I don’t have confidence anymore, that is why my argument about
their increased volume and everything else, I think that they are
maybe singing in the wind.
But anyways, appreciate your comments. Thank you.
Mr. DODARO. Sure.
Mr. GIBBS. I yield back.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. The gen-
tleman from Tennessee, Mr. Cooper, is recognized. Mr. Cooper, you
are now recognized.
Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Congratulations, Gene, on another superb biennial report.
I would like to focus my comments on how we can help you hu-
manize that report because, unfortunately, with over 300 pages,
19
when so much of it is mind-bogglingly complex, the media and our
constituents back home will miss the fact that your report really
is a feast for those of us who hate waste, fraud, and abuse.
So, I want to offer three suggestions as ways we might be able
to keep this report in the news longer and help the news focus
more on the details. Because a detail in your report is still often-
times a multibillion dollar, if not a trillion dollar, matter.
No. 1, I would like to suggest that as great as your report is, it
is almost too much to swallow all at once. When you were talking
about $6.6 trillion in annual outlays from the Government, that is
to say even a small corner of the report can be an incredibly large
and important area. I don’t know if there is a way that maybe we
could parcel this out over some time period so that we have weekly
scandal that we could look into or weekly waste, fraud, and abuse
thing that we could attack.
No. 2, I noticed in your report that you really don’t even look at
anything smaller than $1 billion in money at risk. And that is en-
tirely appropriate for your report, but it seems to me that we might
be able to farm out some of these areas that are smaller than $1
billion but still very much worth pursuing so that we could get, I
don’t know, maybe agency IGs to be held responsible for the items
under $1 billion. Because for the folks back home, cutting things
off at anything smaller than $1 billion as essentially budget dust,
that is hard to explain back home.
My third point is this, and one of the previous questioners was
getting at it. As good as congressional oversight can be, and I am
glad that the DOD infrastructure has made some improvements, I
was heartened to see, for example, that the U.S. Army in the Na-
tional Capital Region in the last 10 years has reduced its leasing
requirements from 3.9 million square feet to only 1 million square
feet. That is saving us like half a Pentagon just right there, and
that is just because we tightened up a little bit of the management
for one of the military services.
But I am worried that we need some sort of mechanism like
maybe freezing the budget of an agency that doesn’t respond to
your request. Because when you mentioned the five charter mem-
bers that have been on your report since the beginning, that is
pretty embarrassing that we haven’t been able to graduate those
charter members into reformed entities that have taken to heart
your recommendations and like the Pentagon should have done,
what, 20, 30 years ago, actually pass an audit.
So, these are just three areas I think where we can work more
effectively together so that we can make your report even more ef-
fective than it already is because the savings you have already
achieved are monumental and wonderful, but there is so much
more that we can do together. So, I just would like your comments
on my three comments.
Thanks.
Mr. DODARO. Yes. First, with regard to the focus of the report
being broad, we only do this once every two years. And what’s been
done in the past that I found effective is a series of hearings that
then delve into individual areas in more depth over a period of
time. Because what we’re trying to do when we do this at the be-
20
ginning of each new Congress is to help set the oversight agenda
for the Congress for the entire two-year period.
And so, you know, that’s still possible to take each of these areas
and have more hearings on them. Other committees have these
hearings, the authorizing committees, the appropriation commit-
tees as well. This committee could pick a subset of issues, focus on
them in more in-depth work. I’ve got plenty of experts in GAO who
can come and testify, get down to the real nitty-gritty details in
those areas.
Second, on the billion dollar cut, that’s just for the high-risk
areas. We look at a lot of programs and activities that are below
$1 billion in GAO and issue regular reports on that. We issue 600
or more reports every year on all facets of the Government.
Also, it can be less than $1 billion if it has public health and
safety risk or national security risk or other areas. And so the dol-
lar threshold is only one of very many factors that we consider in
designating them in the other areas.
The last area that you mentioned I think is important, but that’s
really a policy followed by the Congress, and I think it has to be
tailored to each individual area that’s on the list to make sure that
the incentives work in a proper way, and we don’t actually cause
people to game the systems, and not fix the problem, get around
the penalties or incentives that are in place. That’s been the case
in the past, and I think the best thing—what I’m going to try to
do, Congressman Cooper—and I appreciate your comments on the
report—is I regularly meet with the heads of the agencies once
they’re confirmed to try to get them to focus on these areas.
Where I’ve been successful in that regard, and OMB has been en-
gaged. Really, OMB hasn’t been engaged over the past few years
in this area because some of these require resource investments to
fix as well as other areas. Where OMB is engaged and the Con-
gress is engaged on a continual basis, those are the ingredients for
success and things can come off the list.
And one of the reasons some of these areas are on the list, like
Medicare, is the entitlement programs are on basically automatic
pilot unless there is a change in the requirements. They don’t go
through—a lot of these programs don’t go through the annual ap-
propriation process. So, there could be other ways of getting at
some of these programs.
So, I’d be happy to work with the Congress on implementing all
of your suggestions, more focused attention on individual areas,
crafting incentives to try to provide positive improvement at a
quicker pace over time, focusing in on smaller areas that may not
have the dollars but have, you know, an outsized impact on the
public and their health and safety.
Mr. COOPER. Thanks, Gene.
Madam Chair, I yield back. Thanks.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. The gentle-
woman from North Carolina, Mrs. Foxx, is recognized for five min-
utes or as much time as she may consume.
Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Madam Chairman, and thank you very
much for having this hearing.
And Mr. Dodaro, we really appreciate you. And I want to fol-
lowup on one comment that our colleague Mr. Cooper brought up,
21
and that is I think it is troubling to me and to the American people
that we don’t put groups on the High-Risk List until the exposure
for loss is at least $1 billion. You know, that is a big number for
us, but I am glad to hear what you had to say about we all know—
I think most of us know that you are looking at things that have
exposure to less than that when you are asked to do that.
And I certainly appreciate the work that you have done on look-
ing at programs that come under the jurisdiction of the Education
and Labor Committee, and you all have done a great job on that.
So, I really appreciate what the GAO does. I think we all have to
remember that we are talking about hard-working taxpayer dollars
all the time, and I appreciate it.
A new addition to the High-Risk List this year is national efforts
to prevent, respond to, and recover from drug abuse. Over the past
few years, Congress has authorized billions of funding through leg-
islation such as Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, CARA,
and SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act. Would you say
that the billions in resources provided these and related legislation
is vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse?
Mr. DODARO. I’d have to go back and take a look at that. But
which legislation again, Congresswoman?
Ms. FOXX. CARA Act and SUPPORT for Patients and Commu-
nities Act. We have some real concerns on this, and I wonder if you
looked at how—has GAO looked at where the billions of funding
Congress has passed to fight the opioid crisis has actually been
spent? Has anyone asked about that?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, let me ask Ms. Clowers. She’s on the line.
Nikki, do you—are you familiar with these programs?
Ms. CLOWERS. I am. And Representative, we are actually—we
have ongoing work right now looking at the uses of the opioid fund-
ing. As you noted, billions have been allocated, and we are in the
process of studying how those moneys have been used.
Ms. FOXX. Yes, and I think in particular because this money has
been put out in grants to the states and local government, we need
to expect and demand accountability, like have there been fewer
overdoses? Are more lives being saved?
So, I think too often we never get accountability for these funds,
and the emphasis, it seems to me, should always be there. How-
ever, what we are hearing is increasing rates of drug overdoses in
the 12-month period ending May 2020. So, we have no way of
knowing, as far as I know, again what the impact has been on
these grants and maybe what the impact has been from COVID.
I think there needs to be some emphasis there, too. So, I hope
you all will be looking at that.
Mr. DODARO. We will. We will. Go ahead Nikki.
Ms. CLOWERS. Yes, ma’am. I am sorry. Yes, ma’am. It is a really
good point, both in terms of the grants to the state and local gov-
ernments, but also it is across the Federal Government, too. There
is about a dozen Federal agencies that are involved. And so find-
ing—having that transparency and visibility is important, and we
will bring that to you because, as you said, the overdose deaths
have increased by May 2020. But then also projections in terms of
the impact on COVID that deaths have increased, overdose deaths
22
have increased to about 83,000 during the period of last year,
which is very concerning.
Ms. FOXX. And I think, to go back to what you said earlier, Mr.
Dodaro, that we need to have some feedback from you all on what
needs to be done to tighten up these programs a little bit.
I have one more question. As we all know, the Post Office is re-
peatedly on GAO’s High-Risk List. The Postal Service is not mak-
ing required payments to fund the postal retiree health and pen-
sion benefits, and we had a hearing last week with the Postmaster
General. So, what congressional action do you believe is necessary
to address this issue? It is very timely that you are here to be able
to talk about that in conjunction with the hearing last week.
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Well, I think, in the short term, the Postal
Service needs some, you know fiscal help and release. And I know
there’s been discussions about not requiring pre-funding anymore.
My only caution there is if Congress decides to go that way that
according to our calculations, the fund would only be enough for
the next 10 years to pay for the retiree healthcare costs, and then
there would be a payment of our estimate is $7 billion a year that
our Postal Service would have to come up with to pay on you go
basis.
So, there may be a compromise between not paying at all and
paying a more modest amount into the fund so you don’t have all
of a sudden, you know, a $7 billion bill hits you on a year down
the road. So, we don’t want to kick the can down the road and have
it explode in our face later, and I think so there’d be caution on
that front.
I know there’s some discussion about using Medicare program
that has some options, but there are problems with the Medicare.
The Medicare hospital trust fund is estimated by 2024, which isn’t
that far away, to only have 83 cents to pay on the dollar. So, we’re
shifting part of the problem there, where we already have a prob-
lem.
So, that would help create some room for the Postal Service, but
they need fundamental reform, as I mentioned earlier in my com-
ments to the gentleman, Congressman from Ohio. And I think Con-
gress needs to come to grips with that. They’re not—you can’t deal
with this with just giving them temporary relief and hoping that
it’s going to go away. It’s not going to go away. There needs to be
more fundamental reform, and you got to figure out what the Fed-
eral Government wants to contribute over time and the model be-
cause I’m not sure they could be self-sustaining over a long period
of time.
Ms. FOXX. Right.
Mr. DODARO. I know they’re trying to, and I wish them well. But
the dynamics are not in their favor long term.
Ms. FOXX. Well, when we were in the midst of talking about
these pension reforms, I asked staff to check with me. Only 22 per-
cent of the people in the private sector in this country are covered
by pensions. It just seems very unfair to me to ask the taxpayers,
who have no pensions themselves, to be paying for the pensions of
other people who are working for the Government or in a quasi-
government agency.
23
Thank you, Madam Chairman. I appreciate it very much. I yield
back.
Chairwoman MALONEY. I thank the gentlelady for her question,
and I ask a point of personal clarification.
On the Medicare integration portion, it is my understanding that
the postal people paid into it. They paid into it, and they aren’t
claiming it. And Congress has said they can’t claim it. Certain peo-
ple can’t claim it.
What we were talking about is just allowing the postal workers
to have the same benefit that every person has, that if you pay into
Medicare, you are entitled to get your payment out. Right now, in
our research, the Postal Service had paid $35 billion into the Medi-
care program that their workers were not pulling out because they
had paid it. So, maybe a study on that that clarifies exactly how
much have they paid in, and why are they not allowed to get Medi-
care like anyone else in the country who pays into it.
I now call upon Mr. Connolly. You are now recognized for five
minutes.
Mr. CONNOLLY. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
And welcome, Mr. Dodaro. It is great to see you again. And I do
think that this piece of work by GAO is maybe one of the most crit-
ical pieces of work Congress gets on a routine basis. It is an illu-
minating document. It is a guidepost to what we need to be doing
in Congress, frankly, to make Government work better and cer-
tainly, I think, a flashing red light for many executive agency
heads to understand that they have got problems they have got to
deal with. And so thank you.
I would just note, the gentlelady from North Carolina just talked
about the unfairness of some pensions being helped by tax dollars.
I don’t think anyone is talking about the postal pension program
or the healthcare benefits being bailed out by tax dollars. I mean,
these are dollars paid into those programs by hard-working postal
workers. And we came up in 2006 with this onerous prepayment
requirement—again, with postal workers’ money, not somebody
else’s money—that has unnecessarily burdened the Postal Service
with a debt overhang that is unique to it. And since Congress cre-
ated that problem, we need to fix it, and that is what we are trying
to do with postal reform.
Mr. Dodaro, could you talk a little bit about one of the high-risk
items you identified a number of years ago that we picked up on
and did act on in passing FITARA, which you endorsed and fol-
lowed through on oversight with twice a year hearings—we are
now about to schedule the 12th such hearing—was IT moderniza-
tion of the Federal Government, a lot of legacy systems, lack of in-
vestment, and so forth.
Where are we on that as a high-risk item today?
Mr. DODARO. Well, the passage of FITARA by the Congress and
the continued focus of the FITARA scorecards and the attention of,
Congressman Connolly, you and other members of this committee
have helped make progress. It saved billions of dollars in data cen-
ter consolidations. It’s also drawn a spotlight on the software in-
ventory issue, which is now taken out of the scorecard process be-
cause so much progress has been made in that area.
24
However, there is remaining work to be done. The many agency
CIOs still don’t have the full range of responsibilities that are
needed to make them a key player at the table, oversight over the
IT budgets, sway in some of the decisions that are made. That’s
still a problem area that needs attention in that area.
There is still not fast enough pace on modernization of the legacy
systems. The Technology Modernization Fund was thought to be
had more funds in it that could help in that regard, and that
hasn’t—that hasn’t been necessarily forthcoming in terms of that
expectation.
So, you really need to reform those legacy systems faster for se-
curity purposes, for service purposes, and a wide range of other
areas.
Mr. CONNOLLY. So, if I can interrupt you—if I can interrupt you,
Mr. Dodaro, on that point. And that is why the new President rec-
ommended $10 billion, $9 billion of which would go to the Tech-
nology Modernization Fund precisely to serve as sort of seed capital
and the catalyst to retire those legacy systems, some of which are
40 and 50 years old and getting pretty creaky. Is that correct?
Mr. DODARO. That’s my understanding. I’d ask Nick Marinos, our
IT specialist to comment on that. Nick?
Mr. MARINOS. Yes that’s correct, Congressman Connolly. So, ulti-
mately, the benefit of having the Tech Modernization Fund gain
some additional appropriations would be to give it wider reach. So,
at the moment, there’s only about a dozen projects that have been
approved. But the benefit of TMF would ultimately be to give the
Director of OMB the ability to more rapidly associate where there
are areas that need the funding and then agencies to also go
through a much faster approval process versus what would nor-
mally take probably a couple years for procurement within their
agencies to actually work.
Mr. CONNOLLY. And Nick and Mr. Dodaro, just to show the direct
correlation with COVID–19 relief funding, clearly IT plays an inte-
gral role in delivering the benefits we are voting for. Is that not
correct?
For example, we asked the SBA back in the spring to increase
its lending 30-fold in one month. So, we went from a $20 billion
a year loan portfolio for SBA for small businesses for a year, $20
billion, to $600 billion in one month. And its IT system, eTrans,
could not handle the volume, the demand, and the program
changes for eligibility and review that Congress mandated in the
Federal law.
We saw a similar pattern in the 60 different IT systems at IRS
that got overwhelmed with family payments, child support pay-
ments, as well as doing its job with respect to tax returns. And of
course, at the state level, it has been a nightmare, frankly, because
of IT systems being old and legacy laden in terms of unemployment
insurance benefits.
But could you comment just a little bit about that, how the pan-
demic, how TMF is so necessary as part of the COVID–19 response
because we have seen the creakiness and the fractures in IT sys-
tems that are directly related to the missions for which we need
them, we depend on?
25
Mr. DODARO. No, that’s absolutely right. I mean, basically, there
was serious strain on those systems to just conduct normal oper-
ations. And what we did was we layered on top of that, you know,
trillions of dollars to be spent in a quick period of time, and there-
fore, it took already-stressed systems to the breaking point, to the
brink.
And so you need some help and relief in those areas. And the
state unemployment systems are 40 years old in some cases.
Mr. CONNOLLY. Yes, yes.
Mr. DODARO. And this is the first time as a country we’ve had
unemployment across so many sectors at the same time. Not even
during the global financial crisis did we have as many sectors of
the economy affected as we’ve had with the pandemic. And so
that’s a classic glaring example. SBA is another example where
they’ve been unable to provide the services that are needed in a
short period of time.
The Technology Modernization Fund, as Nick alluded to, pro-
vides a faster vehicle for getting systems in place than going
through the regular process. That was one of its virtues. And so
those things can help, particularly in a pandemic.
You know, we have the tendency to think . You know, if you
just—we just throw money at something, it’s going to solve it. But
in order to do it efficiently and effectively, you need IT, and you
need the people skills in order to do it properly with proper ac-
countability and transparency and efficiency.
Mr. CONNOLLY. Well, I know you are going to the Senate today,
and I hope you will take that message to our colleagues in the Sen-
ate, who thought that the TMF, the Technology Management Fund,
was unrelated to COVID and at one point zeroed it out, to the hor-
ror of the chairwoman and myself and my ranking member Mr.
Hice and I think Mr. Comer as well.
So, thank you for that testimony, and thank you, Madam Chair-
woman, for the indulgence.
Chairwoman MALONEY. Thank you. The gentleman yields back.
The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Cloud, is recognized. Mr. Cloud?
Mr. CLOUD. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
Thank you, Mr. Dodaro, for being here.
As has been said a number of times, I can’t think of a more im-
portant committee hearing for us to have. I look forward to this
each time, and appreciate you coming here and presenting the find-
ings of your report and thank the chairwoman’s latitude in giving
us room to really address this.
You know, I would say the one thing I wish is that we have more
of these, and that believe your report came out Friday, or at least
that is when our offices—they were distributed to our offices, and
so it would be wonderful to have even more time to dig into these
issues and get down to the details of it. Because as you mentioned
a number of times, congressional action is so important, and we
want to make sure we get that right and get the details right. And
so I appreciate you being here.
You know, Last time when you met here, I think we were $22
trillion in debt. We are just about—I checked out the U.S. debt
clock this morning—about to hit $28 trillion, and that is before the
26
$1.9 trillion bill that is working its way through Congress right
now.
And it has also been mentioned when you talk back home about
to even begin to make the list, you have to be potential wasting $1
billion. It has been said years ago I think that you spend millions
and millions, soon it adds up to real money. We are to the point
where it is you spend billions and billions, sooner or later it adds
up to real money. But that is where we are.
I would note, is debt or interest considered in your report?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, I have a special report that I issue every year
on the fiscal health of the Federal Government. That will be com-
ing out in the next month or so. And you know, I basically said in
that report that our Government is on a long-term unsustainable
fiscal path.
I’ve called for reforms to how we set the debt ceiling, which real-
ly doesn’t control the debt, and it causes problems when it’s not
raised in time. Because all the debt ceiling does is authorize Treas-
ury to borrow the money to pay for the bills Congress has already
appropriated and the President signed into law. And there can be
disruptions in the Treasury market and increasing cost.
But we need to do everything as a country now to deal with the
COVID–19 healthcare crisis and to deal with our economy and get
it back in a robust manner. But as soon as that happens, we’ve got
to quickly turn our attention to having a plan, which I’ve called for
now for four straight years, to deal with our long-term problems.
There are problems. Our Highway Trust Fund is insolvent this
year. Congress has been supporting it with other funds. It’s not
self-sustaining, the way it was initially intended. There’s a gap
there of about $195 billion over the next few years.
I mentioned Medicare. By 2024, only have 83 cents to pay on the
dollar for the hospital trust fund. And Social Security by 2031 will
only have enough money to pay 75 cents on the dollar.
Mr. CLOUD. It seems to me, you know, this being a report on
waste, fraud, and abuse, and the potential thereof, that every dol-
lar we spend on interest is wasted. It doesn’t go into any sort of
programs, and of course, interest is about to outpace military
spending even, and that is totally crowding out any sort of discre-
tionary funds that we have.
Do you know how many Federal programs exist? This is a—this
is a number I have been trying to get for a long—do we have a
hard number?
Mr. DODARO. No. There is not a hard number, and I’ve been——
Mr. CLOUD. Are agencies——
Mr. DODARO [Continuing]. Recommending this for years. Actu-
ally, Congress passed a law that required OMB to develop an in-
ventory of programs.
Mr. CLOUD. Right.
Mr. DODARO. That law is now about 10 years old, and we still
don’t have an inventory of Federal programs. Now there’s a Tax-
payers Right-To-Know Act that passed recently——
Mr. CLOUD. Right.
Mr. DODARO [Continuing]. That would require them to do this.
We’ve given them some advice on how it could be done. They’ve
27
tried it before, but it hasn’t worked. They let each agency come up
with their own list. And so we need a program inventory.
Mr. CLOUD. And our office has presented legislation that would
implement a Federal sunset commission, for example, that would
review these. But the first step is counting and figuring out how
many programs and agencies we have for review.
Mr. DODARO. Right.
Mr. CLOUD. And it seems like that it is a difficult——
Mr. DODARO. We’ve done that in some areas, but it takes a lot
of work. And as soon as you have it, it’s outdated.
Mr. CLOUD. Yes. I want us to talk a little bit more on something
that Mr. Hice talked about earlier, and that is just the general how
do we incentivize performance? For example, in business, you have
built-in incentive for efficiency and performance and getting those
metrics and advancing those metrics. In a bureaucracy, it seems
like everything is against that.
You know, everything—there is no incentive and, actually, a dis-
incentive for, if you know if you do something efficiently your budg-
et gets cut, and if you do something poorly, then we come back to
Congress and say we need more money to do it. And then just
there has been sometimes, unfortunately, a sense in a bureaucracy
that the administration, whichever administration it is, is tem-
porary, the bureaucracy is permanent. We will just kind of wait
this out, live this out.
How do we shift that? What are some recommendations you
would have for us in being able to deal with nonperformance and
be able to return, whatever your view, right or left, on the issue
of just being able to return value to the taxpayer?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, right now, the incentives are reversed. When
a program is created in the Federal Government, you have to take
extraordinary measures to stop that program from continued fund-
ing. There’s an assumption that it should be continued funding.
And so if GAO comes up with an idea or the IGs or somebody
else, the onus is on us to say you shouldn’t fund it at that level.
The onus ought to be on the agencies to say that the program is
effective, we’ve evaluated it, it’s meeting its objective, and here’s
when we’re done.
Most of these programs, not only do we not know the number,
we don’t know whether they’re effective or not because they’ve
never done program evaluation. Now Congress passed legislation
recently to go to evidence-based decisionmaking about programs.
And so it’s very important that these program evaluations be done
to see if they’re operating effectively.
So, Congress needs to change the—flip the script and require a
clear record of positive performance to continue funding at the
same level and not assuming that it will continue.
Mr. CLOUD. Sounds like a good case for a sunset commission to
me, among other—I have a whole slew of other questions on spe-
cifics of the different programs, but thank you for the indulgence
on the time. And hopefully, we will be able to have more hearings
on the specifics of this list going forward to address these.
Thank you so much, Madam Chair.
Mr. DODARO. Thank you.
28
Chairwoman MALONEY. Well, all questions can be put into the
record to get answered later, too.
Mr. CLOUD. Right. Well, I will do that, but the discussion now.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman from Maryland, Mr.
Raskin, is recognized for five minutes. Mr. Raskin?
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for this
excellent hearing.
I want to talk about climate change, which is not only a
civilizational emergency, but it is also a fiscal catastrophe. America
has incurred $1.24 trillion in economic damages since 2005 through
various climate disasters and calamities. We have seen millions of
acres of forest in California lost to wildfire, record drought across
the country, record flooding across the country, especially in coastal
cities, a dramatic rise in sea level, millions of climate refugees from
around the world, record velocity hurricanes, and so on.
You call, Mr. Mihm, for a National Climate Strategic Plan. You
call for prioritizing national climate resiliency projects, and you
also call for a new pilot program for community climate migration.
I wonder if you would explain to us what that means?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, I’m going to ask Mr. Gaffigan, who’s our ex-
pert in that area, to respond to that question, Congressman.
Mr. RASKIN. Sure.
Mr. DODARO. Mark?
Mr. GAFFIGAN. Thank you, Congressman. Thank you, Congress-
man Raskin, for the question.
Yes. When we talk about the migration program, there are com-
munities throughout the country that are particularly vulnerable to
climate change. Communities in Alaska, we did a recent report,
looked at communities in Alaska. Maryland, the Eastern Shore and
your home state, as well as other parts of the country. And there
is a need to prioritize the help that we can provide these commu-
nities and not leave them alone as they address these challenges.
Mr. RASKIN. In 2015, the GAO recommended that the Federal
Government come up with a plan to provide information to state,
local, county decisionmakers, as well as private sector decision-
makers, to educate people about the dangers of climate change and
also to promote climate resiliency. I am wondering whether that
happened, why we need it, and also whether you think that such
cooperation and information sharing between the Federal level and
state and county and local level would better prepare us for things
like the Texas power grid disaster that we saw last month because
of extreme weather in Texas that disrupted the lives of millions of
people?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, let me just say, Mark, and I’ll turn it over to
you. Congress passed an important bill that began to move in this
direction back in the 2018 Disaster Reform Recovery Act that re-
quired the agency, FEMA, to create a grant program with funding
for disasters to allow resilience, to be building in resilience up
front.
For years, the Federal Government standard when there was a
disaster is build back the same as it was before, not better. And
this would help agencies—or state and local levels and others to
build more resilience in up front. It’s been proven that, you know,
29
a dollar spent up there can save $9, $10 later on by building resil-
ience in up front.
Mr. RASKIN. OK. And so that is really my question now, when
you are calling for prioritizing national government resiliency
projects, coordination between the Federal level and the state and
local level for community climate migration and so on, I mean,
would all of that help us to prepare for things like the catastrophe
that just took place in Texas where——
Mr. DODARO. Yes, yes.
Mr. RASKIN [Continuing]. People’s lives were disrupted?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Mark, you want to ex-
plain a little bit better?
Mr. GAFFIGAN. Sure. I mean the, the information, you asked
about information, Congressman Raskin, and that has been some
worked on since 2015, but we have been kind of disappointed that
there hasn’t been this national strategy that could pull together
that kind of information. We have done some work on building re-
silience that sort of points to three areas the Federal Government
can help.
One is providing incentives. The other is information, but also in-
tegration. Because not only does this need to be a whole of govern-
ment approach and all levels of government, including tribes, but
it also needs to be a whole society situation where we address this,
bringing in——
Mr. RASKIN. Yes, let me pursue that for one second, Mr.
Gaffigan, because I think that the COVID–19 crisis, I hope if it has
taught us nothing else, it is that an invisible and silent threat can
shut down the country and can traumatize and kill lots of our peo-
ple. Climate change is in the same category, isn’t it? And don’t we
need to mobilize the whole society to confront this danger?
Mr. DODARO. Absolutely, yes. Yes.
Mr. RASKIN. And my time is up. So, I will yield back.
Mr. DODARO. I would just say, Congressman, in closing that we
put that on our list in 2013. We think it’s important to deal with
this to limit the fiscal exposure of the Federal Government, and the
Government—Federal Government can provide leadership, but just
like on the drug misuse area, you need to have national leadership,
but you’ve got to have all segments of the society involved to help.
You know, building codes and structures are set at the local
level. So, if you don’t have them involved, the Federal Government
is going to be limited in what it’s going to be able to do.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much. I yield back, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. The gen-
tleman from Louisiana, Mr. Higgins, is now recognized. Mr. Hig-
gins?
Mr. HIGGINS. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. I thank you,
ma’am and Ranking Member Comer, for holding today’s hearing re-
garding the GAO High-Risk List for 2021. Ensuring oversight of
Federal programs and American treasure should be a priority mis-
sion of this committee. Transparency and supervision of these pro-
grams, while time-consuming, is crucial.
Over the last 15 years, oversight of the High-Risk List has saved
over $575 billion. While large programs are created with trillion
dollar budgets, this has increased exposure, shall we say, to bad ac-
30
tors, Government malfeasance, and unforeseen consequences. This
is almost predictable when we are dealing with this much money.
So, so this is an incredibly important function, and our oversight
should be 100 percent bipartisan. And I am sensing that now.
And I would like to thank my friend Representative Raskin for
bringing up climate change, and I invite him to Louisiana, where
we have a very old saying that if you don’t like the weather in Lou-
isiana, stick around because it will change. Perhaps my constitu-
tionalist friend can visit, and we will have an interesting townhall
in my district regarding——
Mr. RASKIN. I am going to take you up on that, Mr. Higgins. I
would love to join you. Love to.
Mr. HIGGINS. Yes, sir. Always the gentleman you are, good sir.
Madam Chairwoman, critical programs such as the Census, Post-
al Service, cybersecurity, the SBA programs, PPP and EIDL, they
should remain the focus for the GAO and Members of Congress and
this committee. But I would like to focus my time and give our
Comptroller General an opportunity to respond to some questions
I have regarding specifically cybersecurity as it relates to Govern-
ment contracts and national security.
So, Comptroller General, thank you for being here, and I would
like you to give us your insight regarding what GAO is doing, at
what level does vetting take place and your own inspections dive
deep into cybersecurity-contracted entities that deal with pro-
tecting us against intellectual property theft, malware, and cyber
espionage?
And I give you a lengthy time to respond here, sir, because it is
very important. I would like to know. The committee would like to
know. America’s interest is certainly much more heavily focused
now on cybersecurity, as we should be. So, give us the GAO per-
spective there, please, sir. Intellectual property theft, malware, and
cyber espionage.
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Well, we raised this issue recently on intellec-
tual property, most recently with the pandemic in terms of pro-
tecting information regarding vaccines development and distribu-
tion. We had pointed out a lot of problems at HHS, at CDC, the
National Institutes of Health and others, and urged them to correct
the problems that they have in place to protect the intellectual
property around that area.
The Government has a responsibility for all its contractors to
make sure that they have proper safeguards in place in order to
make sure that the business they’re doing with the Government
and access to the Government systems are protected. DOD has just
started a computer or cyber maturity model accreditation to make
sure the contractor systems are up to speed. That’s in its incipient
stages. It needs to be developed further.
I’d ask our expert in the cyber area, Nick Marinos, to add, Con-
gressman, because you’re asking a very good question, and it’s very
important. Nick?
Mr. MARINOS. Yes, Congressman Higgins, I think you raise a
really important point. The reliance that the Federal Government
has on contractors to process Government information is the only
way that we get business done in many ways. And so it requires
Federal agencies to realize that that is their responsibility, that
31
they have to have the capabilities in-house to be able to confirm
that those contractors and also vendors—so it could be the software
that is being utilized—that they have ways to verify the cybersecu-
rity of those products and services.
And unfortunately, as this committee last Friday showed through
its hearing on SolarWinds, you know, our—we are behind the eight
ball on this, and we continue to be, which is why cybersecurity has
remained on the High-Risk List for over 20 years now. The benefits
to having some kind of a certification process are quite significant
because it would allow agencies to have a level playing field, kind
of understand, you know, which contractors have sort of been vet-
ted to sort of clear those security requirements.
But on the other side, this is also a workforce issue. Government
agencies not only need to have cyber expertise within their security
operations center and within their technical capabilities, but also
within their procurement offices. We need to have oversight of
those contractors come from individuals that are both savvy in un-
derstanding how to administer contracts and also how to ensure
that the contractors are adhering to things like security require-
ments as well.
Mr. DODARO. But we’re going to be taking, Congressman, a closer
look at this area because the concern I have is that the agencies
haven’t been able to fix the systems properly that they have re-
sponsibility for, let alone oversee the contractors. So, I think you
got a potential double vulnerability here that needs to be more
deeply investigated.
Mr. HIGGINS. Thank you, sir. I very much appreciate your very
thorough response.
And Madam Chair, I look forward to further discussions on this
issue, and I yield. Thank you, Madam.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. The
gentlelady from California, Ms. Speier, is recognized.
Ms. SPEIER. Thank you, Madam Chair.
I concur with all of my colleagues that this is one of the most
important hearings we have every two years.
Mr. Dodaro, once again, you are a jewel to the Federal service,
and I thank you for the almost a generation that you have been
at GAO.
I would like to start off by suggesting something. I want to asso-
ciate myself in particular with members on both sides of the aisle,
but also specifically the gentleman, my good friend from the state
of Tennessee, Mr. Cooper. I think that there are ways of high-
lighting your work that would be very effective, and I would like
to make one recommendation, Madam Chair.
There is always low-hanging fruit, and it may not be over $1 bil-
lion. What if we were to create—and Mr. Dodaro, this is where you
would come in—a bushel of low-hanging fruit. And I just looked it
up, and a bushel is 32 quarts. So, if we identified 32 programs or
fixes that we should make, that could be real money, and I would
like to recommend that, Madam Chair, as something that we could
do.
As we talk about the SBA, in your report you made reference to
the fact that there is not a review of loans that are under $2 mil-
32
lion. Do you think that number should be lowered and we should
demand that Treasury look at smaller loans?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, I think there should be. Not each individual
loan. What Treasury said is that they want to look at every loan
over $2 million. Our view was that SBA needed to have some plan
on a sampling basis or some risk analysis to go in and look at the
other loans as well, not each and every one of them.
And they do have a plan to look at loans under $150,000, which
is many of the loans are at that level, before they give forgiveness
for the loan. And so, but we’ve just gotten their plan. We haven’t
looked at it yet. But it’s based upon a risk analysis and then a
sampling of the loans, from what I understand.
Dan Garcia-Diaz here is our expert in that area. Dan, do you
have a comment on that, please? I think you’re on mute, Dan. Your
mic is not working? OK, I’ll speak on behalf of Mr. Garcia-Diaz.
And so, you know, we’re going to be——
Ms. SPEIER. I think his microphone is working now.
Mr. GARCIA-DIAZ. My mic is working now, yes.
Mr. DODARO. OK, go ahead.
Mr. GARCIA-DIAZ. Yes. So, there is now plans for both automated
reviews and manual reviews of the different—at different loan lev-
els, and so we are assessing those plans right now. But as the
Comptroller General pointed out, we don’t expect a full review of
all the loans, but rather to devise a process for selecting loans and
particularly flagging loans that may have some questionable char-
acteristics that might further warrant review by SBA.
Mr. DODARO. Yes, I think it’s important as far as——
Ms. SPEIER. Could I ask a followup question? Has the SBA de-
tailed a clear plan on how to recover funds deemed were fraudu-
lently obtained?
Mr. DODARO. Not that we’ve seen yet. And, I don’t believe so. But
my concern here is that this program has been very poorly man-
aged, and we just recently got their oversight that we called for
last June. Now I can understand in March, you know, getting the
money out quickly, but you needed to have an oversight plan in
place soon thereafter.
And one of—there’s been a lot of fraud in this area, both the PPP
program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. And one
of the reasons I think it’s important to look at loans that are all
sizes is that a lot of people committing fraud purposely stay at a
low level and try to, you know, just hit several different times to
stay under the radar screen. And you have instances of people cre-
ating fake businesses that don’t even exist that are getting the
money.
And so there have been over 140 different indictments so far.
About 40-some people have already pleaded guilty. There are hun-
dreds of investigations still ongoing. So, there needs to be some
money.
Now they did recover, from what I understand, about $450 mil-
lion in the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. So, the IGs
and the Justice Department are working together in this area as
well. So, we’re going to be looking at it more carefully once we get
their plans and can evaluate.
33
Ms. SPEIER. Well, as they are starting to ask for forgiveness, it
is really important that we identify the fraud. So, I hope that is
part of your effort. And my understanding is only about a third of
the companies that were in the Fortune 500 list or had the ability
to receive capital elsewhere actually returned the money. So, two-
thirds of them did not.
It would be helpful to me in particular, and probably to other
members of the committee, if we identified those two-thirds of the
companies that did not and create some kind of shaming around
it. I know my time has expired, but I think this is so ripe for our
continuing review this year, Madam Chair, that we do that.
I just want to ask two final questions. You pointed out that—do
you agree that gutting the Naval Audit Service and having less
oversight of these critical programs would be moving in the wrong
direction? It is my understanding that they have actually reduced
the number of persons serving in that capacity.
Mr. DODARO. I’m not familiar with that situation, but I’d be
happy to take a look at it. I have been concerned about some of the
Inspector General functions across Government having their inde-
pendence undermined in a number of cases, and I’ll be happy to
look into that situation and give you my assessment of it.
Ms. SPEIER. Comptroller General, I would agree with you. In
fact, I think many of the Inspector Generals associated with the
military services do not have the skills at all to provide that func-
tion. We saw that most recently at Fort Hood, where the force IG
went down and said everything was great. And then an inde-
pendent committee was sent down, and it did a serious review and
found that there was gross dereliction of duty.
So, I would encourage you to help us define how we should
maybe change Inspector Generals into civilians within each of the
services because I don’t think they are necessarily serving the
American people and may be just protecting the various services.
And finally, let me just ask you, if you haven’t, to look at the con-
tracts for housing at bases around the country and, in fact, around
the world. I think these contracts go on for decades. There is not
accountability.
At recent visits to military bases, I have found serious problems
with lead, asbestos, mold in many of these housing settings where
our servicemembers and their families are living, and it is the
equivalent of tenement living, and I think it is shameful. So, I hope
that you will take some time to look at that.
Madam Chair, thank you for the accommodation. I yield back.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentlelady yields back. The gen-
tleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Keller, you are now recognized.
Mr. KELLER. Thank you, Madam Chair.
This is an important hearing for us to understand which pro-
grams and agencies need reform to improve their effectiveness and
reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in the best interest of the American
taxpayer. Pennsylvania’s 12th congressional District is home to two
Federal prisons, USP Lewisburg and FCC Allenwood, both of which
have been negatively impacted by the Bureau of Prisons inmate
transfer policies and lack of transparency with the American peo-
ple.
34
We saw this firsthand with the BOP when they refused to halt
transfers and movement of the roughly 150,000 inmates it is
charged with securing during the early stages of COVID–19, put-
ting corrections officers and inmates at risk of infection and caus-
ing further community spread. We owe it to our outstanding correc-
tions officers, the inmates they secure, and the surrounding com-
munities to work with the BOP to improve its operations.
Mr. Dodaro, in the last five years, the GAO has made 19 rec-
ommendations related to the BOP, of which 16 have yet to be ad-
dressed. The recommendations are largely centered on rectifying
the BOP’s failure to manage its staff appropriately and improve
mental health, their failure to plan for new inmate wellness pro-
grams that reduce recidivism, and failure to monitor and evaluate
programs which have led to wasting taxpayer dollars. Can you say
more about your ongoing and planned work related to the prison
system?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. As you point out rightly, we’ve been concerned
about this. We’ve made a number of recommendations. My team
just recently met with the head of the Bureau of Prisons service,
and he announced he’s going to create a task force within BOP to
look at the high-risk issues that we’re identifying and to begin to
address the root causes of the problem. So, I was very pleased with
his initial response to our designation that we are considering put-
ting it on the High-Risk List.
Our work now is focused on the FIRST STEP Act, where Con-
gress required a number of reforms to be put in place, and we want
to see if those reforms are being implemented properly, and that
will be the critical determinant as to whether we officially add
them to the High-Risk List or not.
Mr. KELLER. So, you don’t know whether or not they will be
added to the list in the upcoming two years? But I guess it would
be dependent on their performance?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, yes.
Mr. KELLER. OK.
Mr. DODARO. And we designate, Congressman, people onto the
list out of the two-year cycle. So, if we finish our work and we
think that they should be added, we’ll add them out of cycle.
Mr. KELLER. Just for the benefit of the people that might be
watching today’s hearing, can you explain a little bit about what
the High-Risk List is and how an agency or a program gets added
to it?
Mr. DODARO. Sure. The High-Risk List was created in 1990 as
a result of some fraud, waste, and abuse issues that had surfaced
at the HUD, the Housing and Urban Development Department.
There were some procurement scandals at DOD at that time. And
Congress came to the GAO, and they said, well, can’t you identify
what these risks are before they get to be crisis proportion?
And so we developed a list to identify areas in need of fraud,
waste, abuse, and mismanagement, and we started with 14 areas.
Over time, we’ve also added areas of—areas that are in need of
broad-based transformation. In other words, there’s been cir-
cumstances that have changed that they need to make a trans-
formation and to develop.
35
For a good example is on oversight of medical products where
most of our drugs now or ingredients in the drugs are made by for-
eign manufacturers, and FDA was set up for domestic production.
So, that’s an area of needed transformation, and so that helped the
Congress spur that area.
We consider a number of factors, whether it has implications for
public health, safety, the economy, national security, and whether
there’s a lot of taxpayer dollars at risk. Those are the factors to get
on the list.
Then to get off, you have to show leadership commitment. You
have to have the capacity, an action plan, monitor your efforts, and
actually demonstrate some success in lowering the risk or fixing
the problem to get off.
Mr. KELLER. OK. Thank you. I appreciate that. We owe it to our
outstanding corrections officers, the inmates they secure, and the
surrounding communities to work on the BOP to improve their op-
erations.
And based upon what you laid out there as far as the risk to tax-
payers and all the items, in view of what has happened since this
Congress began, the $1.9 trillion, only 9 percent of which is going
to actually public health safety. The other 91 percent is going to
Speaker Pelosi’s payoffs, one of them being a subway in Silicon
Valley for $140 million and also $12 billion going to foreign govern-
ments rather than helping the American people.
In addition to that, we are talking about H.R. 1, which is going
to take taxpayer dollars and use them to fund elections so that
more people, more American people will be watching more election
commercials and so forth at election time. Do you have any plans
on putting Congress on that list to see what reforms could be done?
Mr. DODARO. There are limits to our authority.
Mr. KELLER. That is unfortunate.
Mr. DESAULNIER.[Presiding.] The gentleman’s time has expired.
I will now recognize the gentlelady from Illinois for five minutes.
Ms. Kelly?
Ms. KELLY. Thank the Chair.
Mr. Dodaro, I would like to thank you for all the work your agen-
cy is doing to evaluate our response to the coronavirus pandemic.
This vital work is helping policymakers at all levels of government
understand the challenges we face and inform our efforts to ad-
dress them.
In that vein, I would like to ask you about a topic that many of
my Democratic colleagues and I have noted must play a critical
role in informing our pandemic response data. I am not talking
about the scientific data that support the implementation of public
health measures, like mask wearing and social distancing, but also
the data that helps us to understand the people and places hardest
hit by COVID–19.
Your report today references an earlier GAO report from January
2021, which notes that data collection by state and local entities,
as well as HHS, is ‘‘critical to inform a robust national response.’’
Can you briefly explain why good data is so vital to Federal, state,
and local decisionmaking?
Mr. DODARO. Well, first, this pandemic has laid bare some of the
frailties of our highly decentralized public health system and the
36
need for better data in order to respond to the public health out-
breaks.
First, you need to find out, you know, there wasn’t clear and
complete data on testing. So, you need to know how many people
were being tested and where. Where there were outbreaks. So, how
to target assistance to those outbreaks. The disproportionate effect
that it was having on people of color and what exactly was hap-
pening in those areas.
I’ll ask Ms. Clowers to elaborate a little bit further, but this is
an area where we’ve quickly noted—and this is a real concern
going forward. We need to invest in more public health surveil-
lance, operations, in order to be efficient and effective about our re-
sponses. Nikki?
Ms. CLOWERS. Yes, sir. Congresswoman, as the Comptroller was
saying, the system is fragmented, and so the data is collected by
different actors at the Federal level, as well as state and local. And
because of that, they are often using different definitions of the
data.
So, even when there are efforts to collect data from different
sources, you roll it up, it is incomplete, it is inconsistent because
we haven’t used the same standards. And so we have made rec-
ommendations to the Government to address this. Because to your
point, it is critical that we have better data so we can spot prob-
lems and take the corrective action needed. Without the data, we
can’t make those mid-course corrections.
And to the point the Comptroller General made as well, COVID
has laid bare the disparities in health outcomes that we are seeing.
And again, we need better data on that. For example, right now,
in terms of vaccine, vaccines rates, about 50 percent of all of that
data is missing race and ethnicity information. We need better data
on that so we can better target populations to make sure that they
are having the right access to care and to the vaccines.
Ms. KELLY. Your report also notes the need for HHS to have
strong, clear coordination with states, territorial, and tribal govern-
ments and the public as we work to distribute and administer the
vaccines. You reference the agencies’ responsibility for managing a
national evidence-based campaign to increase awareness of the
safety and efficacy of the vaccines, particularly in communities
with low vaccination rates. Why is this initiative so important, and
what can HHS do to make sure it is as successful as possible?
Mr. DODARO. Nikki, please?
Ms. CLOWERS. Yes. A critical piece is involving the state and
local officials. They play a key role in any type of the public health
measures that we are taking, but also, importantly, the vaccination
efforts. And that is why we recommended in September 2020 that
the Federal Government needed to develop a distribution strategy
which included outlining the communication with and obtaining
input from state and local governments and ensuring that popu-
lations are reached.
You know, it is the local governments that understand their com-
munities, their citizens, and can help ensure that we reach those
populations in getting the vaccine out, getting the word out about
the vaccine and the benefits of having—of taking the vaccine.
37
Ms. KELLY. It does seem like a more comprehensive data collec-
tion would aid our efforts to understand systemic racial disparities
in the United States and actually advance reforms to achieve
health equity.
With that, thank you so much to the witnesses and your pa-
tience, and I yield back.
Mr. DESAULNIER. I now recognize the gentleman from Arizona,
Congressman Biggs.
Mr. BIGGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
This is at least the third hearing I have participated in since
coming to Congress related to the GAO’s High-Risk List, and each
year, I see many of the same agencies and programs in the report.
For example, I served on the House Science, Space, and Technology
Committee my first two terms. So, I am very familiar with the En-
vironmental Protection Agency’s Integrated Risk Information Sys-
tem, or IRIS, which receives very brief mention on pages 31 and
32 of the report.
The IRIS program was meant to be a clearinghouse of sorts with-
in EPA for consolidating data and reporting on chemical toxicity.
The problem, though, is that many of the program offices within
EPA, for example, the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Pre-
vention and the Office of Water, have already been doing their own
research and integrating their findings with other departments. So,
in other words, IRIS is an unnecessarily duplicative super-struc-
ture.
When I chaired the SST Environment Subcommittee, I advocated
for eliminating IRIS and returning more work to the EPA program
offices. For those who are curious, I have also introduced a bill to
achieve this result, H.R. 62, the Improving Science in Chemical As-
sessments Act.
Going back to the IRIS references in the GAO’s High-Risk List,
the report accurately identifies a major problem with IRIS stating
that the program did not issue a completed chemical assessment
between August 2018 and December 2020. The report then goes on
to suggest that the failure of IRIS was rooted in larger faults with
EPA because the agency did not indicate, and I am quoting here,
‘‘did not indicate how it was monitoring its assessment nomination
process to ensure it was generating quality information about
chemical assessment needs.’’
Further, the report suggests EPA ‘‘lacked implementation steps
and resource information in its strategic plan and metrics to deter-
mine progress in the IRIS program.’’
Maybe if EPA were better at monitoring its assessment protocols,
we would have a better IRIS. That is possible, I suppose. But
again, I posed a much simpler and more cost-effective solution of
eliminating IRIS altogether, and that speaks to a larger issue I
have with the GAO High-Risk List.
It doesn’t seem to offer many recommendations to fully eliminate
some problematic programs, even though that course may, indeed,
be the best option in some cases. Or maybe, quite frankly, in many
cases.
Mr. Dodaro, is there a reluctance on your agency’s part to make
recommendations for the full elimination of consistently problem-
atic programs, such as the IRIS program?
38
Mr. DODARO. Not if we have the evidence necessary to support
that. We’ve not looked at the IRIS program in the context of what
you’re mentioning, and let me ask Mr. Gaffigan if he has a view
on that matter.
Mr. GAFFIGAN. Yes, thank you for your question, Congressman
Biggs.
You know, there are many ways the assessments can be done.
The current process, as it is set up, allows for a nomination proc-
ess, it did at one point, and for these assessments to be done. Our
main point is the assessments aren’t being done. And whether it
is done in the program offices or at IRIS, there is a need to commit
the resources to it.
And so, you know, that is an option going forward. The bottom
line now is the assessments are not getting done. Whether it is
done by an IRIS program or another alternative, as you suggest,
those are all viable ways to do it. It is just not getting done right
now.
Mr. BIGGS. Thank you. I appreciate the answer to the question.
And rather than droning on further about the IRIS program and
its need, I would suggest that as we look forward, we might—I
would appreciate recommendations such as in the IRIS program,
which has been so problematic and so duplicative, maybe—maybe
viewing it from your perspective of whether that program should
actually be eliminated or go forward.
And so I would ask for that request. And then I would just say
that the IRIS program has been bugging me, actually, as you can
tell, for about four years now because it is duplicative. I think it
needs to go away. I think we can accomplish this more efficiently.
And if resources need to be redrawn there, we can do that.
And I appreciate your comments, Mr. Dodaro and also Mr.
Gaffigan. And with that, Mr. Chairman, I will yield back.
Mr. DESAULNIER. Thank you, Congressman. I now recognize the
gentlelady from Michigan, Ms. Tlaib, for five minutes.
Ms. TLAIB. Thank you so much.
I think it is important to say to my colleagues across the aisle,
you know, the problem isn’t IRIS. The problem is Republican re-
fusal to believe in science and take climate change seriously. It is
no coincidence that the EPA failed to do its job under the Trump
administration.
As you all know, I represent a zip code that is the most polluted
zip code in the state of Michigan. So, climate change is here, and
its impacts are becoming more and more devastating with each
passing year.
So, we must stop weighing whether or not we will act on climate
change by how much money it will cost our Government and big
corporations and start measuring the substantial expense of this
country’s inaction on climate change on communities across the
country, especially our black, brown, and low-income communities.
And we must also focus on detrimental health impacts resulting
from our reliance on fossil fuels. The child with asthma who is
forced to miss school because their house is surrounded by cor-
porate polluters, and this is a real fact that happens in my commu-
nity. A third of a class will raise their hand and say they have
asthma.
39
The family who has uprooted everything because of constant
flooding. That is happening in my community in the Dearborn
Heights neighborhood. Or the neighborhood block that has been
completely devastated by respiratory diseases and cancer because
of dirty air.
So, Mr. Dodaro, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Inte-
grated Risk Information, the IRIS system is supposed to assess the
health hazard of chemicals in the environment to inform all of us
so that we can make much more informed decisions on our environ-
ment policies and regulations to keep our communities safe. How-
ever, the GAO report states that, and I quote, ‘‘EPA’s agency-wide
strategic plan for fiscal years 2018 through 2022 does not mention
the IRIS program at all.’’
So, I am wondering, and furthermore, I know the report also
notes the astonishing fact that the IRIS program had not com-
pleted a single, not one, chemical risk assessment between August
2018 and December 2020. So, Mr. Dodaro, is it fair to say that
these assessments can literally be life or death for communities
like mine because they identify chemicals and pollutants that pose
potential fatal adverse health effects?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Basically, the Government can’t take informed
action without a thorough assessment, now whether it comes from
IRIS or somewhere else. But I would note, we rated the EPA area
as an area that regressed because they were proposing, the admin-
istration had been proposing to cut the IRIS budget, but Congress
kept reinstating——
Ms. TLAIB. By 34 percent. Isn’t that correct?
Mr. DODARO. That’s correct. But Congress reinstated the funding,
and so that’s the reason we didn’t rate them down in leadership.
What we rated down is monitoring and an execution area.
Mark, do you have any other thoughts you want to mention?
Mr. GAFFIGAN. No, I think that is true. And again, we would just
like to see the assessments done because they are important to ev-
eryone’s health. And you know, how we do that, that can be dis-
cussed, and there are good options.
The other thing I would mention, Congresswoman Tlaib, is the
issue of environmental justice. We did a report in 2019 that pointed
out the interagency working group. There are 16 agencies working
on environmental justice issues, and many of them had done some
individual plans, but we found that the plans were not updated.
There was a lack of performance measures around the issue of en-
vironmental justice affecting particularly communities of color, and
that is a huge need going forward.
Ms. TLAIB. Yes. I really would urge my colleagues, and this is
sincere, come visit my district. I have given a number of tours,
what I call the ‘‘toxic tour.’’ Come breathe the air. You can smell
it in the neighborhoods I represent. Meet your fellow Americans
that don’t have access to running water in the richest country on
Earth.
Come and tell us to the face of, again, your fellow Americans and
that they are trying to raise their children that it is too costly to
protect the climate, that it is too costly to address climate or envi-
ronmental toxins and to really combat corporate greed that is so
40
interconnected to a lot of these decisions that were made by the
Trump administration, including missing deadlines and so forth.
Because that is exactly what our Government says again and
again and again to residents like mine through these failures is
that it is OK that they aren’t breathing clean air. It is OK that
their lives are shortened because we are doing nothing on these
issues.
So, I really thank all of you for your report. I know there was
a number of things I wanted to ask in regards to missing deadlines
and some of the lack of prioritizing these issues, but again, I really
appreciate and appreciate the chairwoman’s intention in making
this a critical issue to address. So, I really appreciate that.
Thank you, and I yield.
Mr. DESAULNIER. Thank you. And the chair now recognizes the
gentleman from Kansas, Mr. LaTurner, for five minutes.
Mr. LATURNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you
for holding this important hearing to help the committee to really
focus on its primary mission to investigate, locate, and root out all
fraud, waste, and abuse from the Federal Government, an enor-
mous task already, with expected F.Y. 2021 budget outlays nearly
$6 trillion, but one that has been greatly complicated over the past
12 months with soon to be $2 trillion in new spending for COVID-
related and mostly unrelated spending.
I want to applaud the Comptroller General for his 300-page re-
port detailing just how much Congress is failing in this central
mission of making sure that every hard-earned taxpayer dollar is
being spent in a responsible and worthwhile manner. But this is
far from a partisan issue. Both sides have failed in cleaning up this
mess. We know that during the past 15 years alone, this effort by
GAO has saved nearly $575 billion, including $225 billion just
these past two years.
I am afraid to even consider what percentage of the total Federal
budget is lost to waste, fraud, and abuse. I can only imagine. Now,
more than ever, with new programs created by the CARES Act, in-
cluding the roughly $350 billion Provider Relief Fund and the near-
ly $750 billion Paycheck Protection Program, it is critical that Con-
gress and in particular this committee work together to ensure
these new moneys are going to people who have legally dem-
onstrated they are qualified to receive the funding.
But that is not all. I especially want to touch upon the growing
unemployment claims fraud scandal that has impacted our Nation
and, frankly, robbed my home state of Kansas. Last year, Congress
authorized the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars for
both the Federal pandemic unemployment compensation program
and the pandemic unemployment assistance program for self-em-
ployed workers.
This dramatic increase in funding has overwhelmed state sys-
tems, including Kansas, that were wholly unprepared and failed to
respond to the wave of fraudulent claims after several red flags
were present and obvious. In Kansas, we lost an estimated $600
million in false claims, according to a legislative post audit report
released last month. That is 24 percent of claims. This is money
we are all likely to never get back. Nationwide, the U.S. Depart-
41
ment of Labor believes the figure is roughly $63 billion during this
last year.
Madam Chairwoman, I would like to submit the Kansas state
audit report and a Kansas delegation letter to Governor Kelly for
the record.
Mr. DESAULNIER. Without objection.
Mr. LATURNER. Thank you.
While I understand these are state-run programs, it involves bil-
lions of Federal taxpayer dollars with language requiring certain
integrity measures that are put in place. So, I would appreciate
your perspective on this subject.
It is my understanding that the GAO threshold to make the
High-Risk List is $1 billion. Help me understand why the various
Federal pandemic unemployment system programs, with an esti-
mated fraud level of $63 billion for 2020, didn’t make your list.
Mr. DODARO. Well, we considered that, and they’re going to con-
tinue to look at that issue. We haven’t had a chance to look in
depth at it at this point in time, but we will consider it as we move
forward.
Mr. LATURNER. Could you talk about the process of consideration
and what facts you are bringing to bear in making that decision?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Well, we have work underway looking at the
system, at what needs to be done in order to fix it. In a lot of cases,
one of the factors that we consider in putting something on the
High-Risk List is that GAO has some recommendations for how to
address that issue. Now given that most of these unemployment
systems are state by state determined in terms of the criteria for
looking at them and also the factors, so there could be different
reasons in each state. So, we’re going to have to look very carefully
at this and decide whether we have, after we looked at it carefully,
have appropriate recommendations to make so that we could point
to what needs to be done that gets the agencies off the High-Risk
List.
It’s not enough to just say there’s a big problem, but we have to
have something that we bring to bear in order to say how it should
be fixed. And in this case, the fixes are state-centric, and so we
need to really inform ourselves on how to go about this. We typi-
cally don’t have—make recommendations to individual states to fix
their systems.
Mr. LATURNER. Could you give me—my time is running out.
Could you give me a timeframe, and are you willing to come back
to this committee and report any findings? A timeframe for the de-
cision?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Well, I’d have to get back to you on the time-
frame. I’m not sure exactly where that work stands right now, but
we’d be happy to come back and talk about it, though. I’ll provide
a timeframe for the record.
Mr. LATURNER. Thank you for your time, and thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Mr. DESAULNIER. I thank the gentleman. And I will recognize
myself at this time. Just want to add my congratulations to a job
well done, as every year, to you and your staff. Really terrific work.
On the comments from my friend across the aisle from Texas, we
would like to work with you and him on the issues of incentivizing
42
good performance and performance-based budgeting. When I was
on the executive board of the National Conference of state Legisla-
tures, we did a lot of work with your colleagues, or they did, to try
to get those best practices. And I will say that very successful pro-
gram here in my district years ago when I was a county supervisor,
we were actually able to target at-risk kids by Census track over
time.
But the funding and the incentives were given us by foundations,
and it put us in a position to save quite a bit of money now 20,
25 years later to look at what we did and really become a national
model. So, I would love to work with you on that. Incentivizing
good performance and reinvesting those cost savings are of great
interest to me.
Specifically, I would like to talk to you about your report on the
Office of National Drug Control Policy. We know opioids, and this
committee has done a lot of work in this area, and thank the chair-
woman for bringing Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers here for a
memorable hearing just recently. But the costs of drug abuse in
this country, $600 billion, according to NIH, and treatment is—
helps us $12, for every $1 spent saves us $12.
So, Mr. Dodaro, you recognized this before the pandemic, but you
held off the release of your recommendations, as I understand it.
Can you talk a little bit about that and the context, as your staff
has said, in this terrific book that I just finished, ‘‘Diseases of De-
spair,’’ about the continued increase in diseases of despair—suicide,
alcoholism, and drug abuse—and not just the human suffering, but
the cost to state, local government.
So, COVID has made a very difficult problem worse. Could you
talk a little bit about that and then maybe specific comments about
the previous administration, in my view, really poor performance,
and the metrics we need to improve the National Drug Control Of-
fice?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. First, we did designate our intention to add it
formally to the High-Risk List in March 2020, but we did not with-
hold our recommendations. I mean, we made specific recommenda-
tions at that point about what needed to be done to make the strat-
egy, the national strategy meet all the statutory requirements. We
felt it was appropriate to not distract from the efforts to focus on
the pandemic at that point in time. So, we didn’t withhold the rec-
ommendations, just the formal designation to add it to the High-
Risk List.
The pandemic, you know, complicated. We did realize, even back
last March, that the pandemic was likely going to exacerbate some
of the underlying problems that lead to drug abuse in the first
place, which are unemployment, isolation, depression, and other
things that were happening potentially to people who were vulner-
able to those type of issues during the pandemic or a lockdown pe-
riod of time. And indeed, some of the early data that’s available
from CDC show an increase in the March, April, May timeframe
that I referred to earlier, during the—the preliminary data on the
amount of COVID deaths due to overdoses. Not COVID deaths, due
to—deaths due to overdoses at that point in time.
Now some of the things that need to be done that are missing
is the law calls for a five-year resource plan for each area that’s
43
required. That hasn’t been done yet, and these problems are not
going to get solved looking at it only a year-by-year basis. You need
to have a long-term plan.
The treatment area, there’s only—there’s 30 percent of the coun-
ties in the United States that don’t have access to substance abuse
disorder treatment for people so that there’s a huge problem there
as well. There needs to be more coordination. We pointed out where
some of the agencies are pursuing plans, but it’s not clear how
their plans contribute to the national strategy, and there needs to
be more evaluation of what’s working and what’s not working and
more engagement and coordination with the private sector, state
and local governments, healthcare providers, law enforcement, and
others because this is a multifaceted problem.
Mr. DESAULNIER. I really appreciate it and look forward to con-
tinuing the conversation. I do want to mention legislation that was
passed last session that was spearheaded by our former chair Eli-
jah Cummings to help facilitate with the coordination. I hope we
can work on that, make that successful with this administration.
Thanks again so much.
I would now like to recognize the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr.
Grothman, for five minutes.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Yes, I would like to talk about the drug abuse
programs myself again. I wish it was true that you could spend $1
and save $12. I always wonder if those studies are right on point,
you know, that you can spend $1 and save $12.
But in any event, over time, seems to me we have spent more
and more money on drug abuse, at least it seems to me that we
brag about the amount we are spending. Nevertheless, we still are
around 80,000 lives lost a year, which is really tragic. And I would
think, given all the money we are plowing into this, that we would
begin to make some progress.
We all have—or at least I have reasons why I think we are not
doing a very good job here. But given that we keep throwing more
dollars at it, are there any programs in the drug abuse field that
we feel have failed and have eliminated or cut back on? Given that
we hit records every year in the number of people who die, or at
least recently we do, I would assume some of these programs are
failing.
Mr. DODARO. Well, one of the areas we point out is a lack of eval-
uations in some of these programs. Let me ask Ms. Clowers, who’s
director of our healthcare area, if she wants to add anything.
Ms. CLOWERS. I would add two points. In terms of the ONDCP
strategy that has been put out, this is an area where we have
pointed out the strategy needs to be improved, that they do need
performance measures for efforts that are ongoing so we can assess
whether programs are making progress or making a difference.
The second point I would mention is that we do have ongoing
work looking at the different grants that are being provided to
states to help combat the opioid epidemic, and we will be looking
to examine what we are getting with those funds.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Yes, I mean, it frustrates me because this is an
issue that I care deeply about. And of course, because everybody
cares for it, you keep voting for more and more. But when you—
and I assume there is a lot more money being spent today than,
44
say, six or seven years ago, but it seems the number of people who
die just keeps going up. And part of it could be the COVID, but
in any event, when you plow this much money into a program or
programs with a promise that we are going to fight this overdose
stuff and it keeps going up, is anybody ever weeding out the bad
programs so we have money left for the good program? And you are
telling me that doesn’t happen?
Mr. DODARO. Not as rigorously as it should. That’s one of the
reasons we elevated it to the High-Risk List is to make sure that
there is more focus on this and there is more evaluation of these
programs, so we can tell what works and what doesn’t work and
make adjustments to those.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Yes. And as far as you know, there are no pro-
grams that categorically are wiped out for being no good, or when
we send out the grants, we are not going to send it to these pro-
grams. It is just kind of up, up, up all the time?
Mr. DODARO. Well, I’ll go back and take a look at that and see
if there’s anything that we’ve done along those lines, and I’ll pro-
vide an answer for the record.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Yes. We have had several programs on the High-
Risk List since the 1990’s, which is concerning. You know, when we
identify a problem, you would like to think in 30 years, we would
begin to address it.
One of those are improper payments to Medicare, and that can
be wildly expensive, of course, because doctor bills are wildly ex-
pensive. But it is still on the program 30 years later. Can you tell
us why it is apparently not addressed or not addressed enough to
keep it off the list?
Mr. DODARO. Actually, the improper payments are coming down
in the Medicare area. So, I’ve been pleased that there’s been some
progress in that area.
It’s also on the list because of the restructuring and the move
from paying people for the quantity of services to get the quality
of healthcare in there as well. So, there are some reforms that need
to be made. We’ve made some recommendations to the Congress to
give authority for recovery auditors to look at things prepayment.
We’ve also suggested that CMS more use prior authorization before
they make payments and to expand—they’ve done this for pilot
programs that have been successful. Where they’ve saved money,
prevented improper payments, and it’s not affected the ability of
people to get services, that they expand that more often.
Actually, the bigger problem now is Medicaid improper payment.
Medicaid improper payments for last year over $85 billion, com-
pared to $42 billion in Medicare. So, Medicare is coming down. It
can come down further with implementation of our recommenda-
tions. Medicare is dramatically increasing—Medicaid, rather, ex-
cuse me.
Mr. GROTHMAN. They are similar programs. Why is Medicaid
such a bigger problem than Medicare?
Mr. DODARO. Well, you have a lot of different state programs and
rules. Each state has their own different Medicaid program. Medi-
care, you have more uniformity across the program, and it’s run by
the Federal Government versus a partnership with the individual
state programs. We’ve expanded Medicaid quite a bit in the Afford-
45
able Care Act and also with the recent pandemic. And so the pro-
grams are changing quite a bit.
One of the reasons it’s going up so fast now is that some of the
states aren’t doing enough to enroll providers and make sure that
the providers that are enrolling are eligible to provide services
under the program. So, and the managed care portion of Medicaid,
which started out as a small program, is now about half of the
spending, and there is still not enough scrutiny, in my opinion,
over the managed care portion of Medicaid.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Thank you.
Chairwoman MALONEY. [Presiding.] Thank you. The gentlelady
from California is recognized. Representative Porter?
Ms. PORTER. Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Mr. Dodaro, is it correct that the Federal Government fails to col-
lect taxes that it is owed to the tune of about $400 billion a year?
Mr. DODARO. That’s correct. That’s the gross amount. The IRS
is—go ahead, please.
Ms. PORTER. That is the gross amount. And we call this—this is
often referred to as the ‘‘tax gap,’’ but it seems to me it is really
more like a canyon in terms of the amount of money. So, this is
one of the charts from your report, and it shows the gap right here
between the blue, which is what is owed, and the green, which is
what is collected. And we collect about 11 percent of what—of this
missing amount.
So, what your report shows is that of the $458 billion that is this
tax gap, after the IRS engages in enforcement, they only collect
this blue portion, and all of this red portion—and that is a lot of
zeroes there—$406 billion goes uncollected. Based on the GAO
studies over the years, has this amount, this tax gap, gotten small-
er? Are we tackling this problem year after year and working on
it?
Mr. DODARO. We’re not as successful as a government at IRS
that I’d like to see. The problem is not getting better. It’s stayed
actually about the same over the period of time. There are some
recommendations——
Ms. PORTER. So, on average, every year, we fail to collect $406
billion?
Mr. DODARO. Well, they think they’ll collect some. The net tax
gap or what they definitely don’t think they collect is $381 billion,
but you’re—it’s in the ballpark. So, yes, that’s true—that’s true.
Ms. PORTER. For a person like me, $381 billion, $400 billion, it
is all just a lot of zeroes that is not being paid. I have a question
for you. In your GAO high-risk report, you say that this is relating
to staffing problems. So, has IRS been increasing its staffing so
that we can collect what we are owed as taxpayers?
Mr. DODARO. Staffing has only been going recently up. It’s been
declining over time, and I think they’re not back up to the 2010
levels yet. Let me ask Mr. Mihm to give you an example. But the
problem is not just staffing. There are some other things that could
be done. Chris?
Ms. PORTER. What are those other things?
Mr. DODARO. I think Congress should regulate, authorize IRS to
regulate the paid tax preparers, No. 1. Some of the studies that
we’ve looked at using their data, in some cases taxpayers’ accuracy
46
is more accurate than people that use paid tax preparers, particu-
larly in the earned income tax credit area.
Second, there ought to be more information returns prepared so
that the IRS could match data. For example, for real estate, people
that fix up their real eState property, to report that, as well as
businesses, corporations that have services. They can report that
data. The IRS could cross-check it to the providers to see what
they’re reporting.
Ms. PORTER. So, Mr. Dodaro——
Mr. DODARO. There’s also—yes.
Ms. PORTER [Continuing]. I just have a sort of basic question.
Who benefits from failing to collect taxes that are owed?
Mr. DODARO. Only the people that owe them that are not paying
them.
Ms. PORTER. So tax cheats, tax underpayers, delinquents, that is
who is benefiting. Who is being hurt by this failure to collect be-
tween $381 billion and $406 billion on average a year? Who is
being hurt?
Mr. DODARO. Well, the Americans are getting hurt. The people
that are——
Ms. PORTER. Americans are getting hurt.
Mr. DODARO. The people that are paying their taxes and the
other people that aren’t paying taxes because they’re too young, but
we’re borrowing money to pay for things that they’re going to have
to pay for in their generations ahead. So, everybody is getting hurt
by it.
Ms. PORTER. OK. So, everybody is getting hurt at the expense of
tax cheats or tax frauds who are getting helped.
Mr. Dodaro, what is the GAO’s motto?
Mr. DODARO. Our motto?
Ms. PORTER. Mm-hmm.
Mr. DODARO. Accountability, integrity, and reliability is our core
values.
Ms. PORTER. OK. On your recent reports, you have this slogan,
‘‘A century of nonpartisan fact-based work.’’ Does this ring a bell?
Mr. DODARO. It does. This is our 100——
Ms. PORTER. A century of nonpartisan fact-based work. I wish
that Congress could have that as its motto for even one day, much
less a century. Does the GAO sell T-shirts with that motto, ‘‘A cen-
tury of nonpartisan fact-based work,’’ because I would totally buy
one of these T-shirts. I would buy them for all my family and give
the money to the IRS to enforce against collecting taxes from peo-
ple who are cheating the rest of us.
With that, I yield back.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentlewoman yields back. I now rec-
ognize the gentlewoman from New Mexico, Ms. Herrell.
Ms. HERRELL. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And thank you so much, Mr. Dodaro, for being here. It is incred-
ible, and I kind of want to echo what my colleague have said. It
is just almost too much for one committee hearing because there
is so much information. So, I just appreciate all of your comments,
and if I am redundant, I apologize. I ran to vote.
But something one of my colleagues was saying earlier, there are
so many programs, and you had mentioned earlier that it is some-
47
times hard to know exactly how many there are. But are there pro-
grams that have been funded or happening for years and years
where maybe we need to take, think about maybe a different ap-
proach? Think about things outside the box?
Maybe like Einstein says if you keep doing the same thing over
and over and you still get the same results, perhaps it is time to
change your thought process. And I am wondering, are there things
that you see that maybe Congress could be doing very differently
to help either have more accountability or more success so that we
don’t see this number of programs on this High-Risk List? Does
that make sense?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, yes. Yes, well, we have, as I mentioned, just
in the tax area, recommendations for Congress to act, to give IRS
the authority to do this. We have a number of recommendations for
Congress to act on that we think can be helpful in helping resolve
these areas.
I mentioned that we talked about the Postal Service before.
There is actually 14 of the high-risk areas that the solution to solv-
ing that involves congressional action. Surface transportation, Post-
al Service, for example. So, we’ve highlight where Congress needs
to act that could act on those areas.
Now with regard to the programs I mentioned earlier, I think
Congress ought to insist on having program evaluations that dem-
onstrate the success of the program before continuing to fund it
often at increased levels. So that, I think, would be a game changer
that I think would get the attention of a number of advocates of
those programs to really do, you know, investigations and evalua-
tions.
Ms. HERRELL. And I agree with that. And just looking at it from
the lens of our constituents, it is different. They are not in the halls
of Congress. They don’t hear the conversations and even under-
stand always some of the dialog that is taking place.
And so I can—just to kind of simple it down, I can tell you what
they will ask me in my district. It will be things such as how are
we sending money to foreign countries or maybe for aid or for dif-
ferent programs, sometimes to not even countries that are our al-
lies, when we can see that we have possible trouble heading our
way with the Highway Trust Fund, like you mentioned, or Social
Security or Medicaid, you know, or even updating the computer
systems in the IRS.
And I am just asking is this solely resting on the shoulders of
Congress to do a better job in allocations, or is this something that
these departmental programs can come forward with where we can
work collectively? But do you see where I am going with this? Peo-
ple don’t understand how we are sending so much money overseas
in some cases, but yet not taking care of, say, our infrastructure,
the IT, and other things that really have a direct impact on some
of these programs.
Mr. DODARO. Well, you have two dimensions here. You have the
President, on behalf of the administration, recommending funding
for these programs. But the ultimate decision lies with Congress as
to whether they’re going to fund the programs or not.
Ms. HERRELL. Right.
48
Mr. DODARO. That’s not, you know, a prerogative of my organiza-
tion. Our job is to advise the Congress and so that they can make
informed decisions. But those ultimate decisions about the policy
priorities of the Government rest in Congress’ hands.
Ms. HERRELL. Right. And I am just going to shift gears just a lit-
tle bit because I come from a border state, and just can you discuss
the work of GAO as it relates to drug trafficking across our border
and areas of improvement your agency found the Government
needs to make to intercept drugs and improve border security? Be-
cause I know that has just been issue we have been seeing for dec-
ades, but just your thoughts on that.
Mr. DODARO. Oh, yes. We’ve done a lot of work in that area and
have recommendations. I’d be happy to provide those for the
record.
Ms. HERRELL. Great, great. Because it just—what concerns me
is, obviously, we have this crisis, the drug overdose, all over the
country. And certainly, we see it in New Mexico, and we under-
stand that a lot of drugs, illicit drugs are coming through those
southern borders, and other ports everywhere. But I am thinking
that opening the borders might compound this if it feels like we are
starting to see some improvement on that.
But I can see that Congress has a lot of work to do, and again,
I really appreciate your comments today.
And Madam Chair, I wish we had more——
Mr. DODARO. I think the issue there, we need to focus on the bor-
der and the interdiction of drugs. But we really need to work on
bringing the demand down. As long as there is demand for the
product, the product is going to find its way here.
Ms. HERRELL. Right.
Mr. DODARO. And that’s something that we’ve never been suc-
cessful on in the Government as long as I’ve been here, and I’ve
been here a long time. And that’s one of the reasons I decided to
try elevate it to the High-Risk List to get some greater attention
on the education and prevention front of this thing as well as the
interdiction and, of course, treatment programs, but we haven’t
quite found the magic formula to balance the dimensions to make
any progress in this area.
Ms. HERRELL. Right. That makes sense, and it does. And I appre-
ciate those comments.
And Madam Chair, thank you for the additional time, and we
have our work to do for sure. So, thank you, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman MALONEY. Thank you. The gentlelady yields back.
The gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Johnson, is now recognized. Mr.
Johnson?
Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And Mr. Dodaro, thank you for being here today, and I agree
fully with you, and I would go further to say that the war on drugs
has been an abysmal failure in this country. But I want to ask you
about the FDA. The coronavirus pandemic has put immense pres-
sure on all facets of our healthcare system, including the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration, which has been working, by the way,
nonstop to facilitate the approval of COVID vaccines and drug
therapies. This work has been further complicated by drug short-
ages and inept leadership from the previous administration.
49
Drug shortages are not only a serious threat to Americans’
health and safety, they are also incredibly expensive. In 2019, a
survey found that drug shortages cost hospitals $360 million annu-
ally in labor costs alone. Of the 6,000 healthcare facilities surveyed,
more than half faced at least 20 shortages during the six-month
study.
Today’s report highlights the important role the FDA plays in ad-
dressing drug shortages and why their role is particularly impor-
tant during a global pandemic. Has the problem, sir, of drug short-
ages been more severe or become more severe because of the
COVID–19 pandemic?
Mr. DODARO. I want to ask Nikki Clowers, the head of our
healthcare team, to answer that question. Nikki?
Ms. CLOWERS. Yes, I think what the pandemic has done is shown
the vulnerabilities that we have in our drug supply chain. As
many—as you probably know, most of our generic drugs are manu-
factured overseas. And so whenever there is a crisis or other dis-
ruption in the supply chain, that can affect the availability of drugs
and lead to drug shortages.
We have made recommendations to FDA to help them better
manage drug shortages. It is certainly not only an FDA responsi-
bility. It is a shared responsibility, and the private sector is in-
volved. But we think there is more that FDA could do in terms of
using data and trying to forecast where there is different drug
shortages.
We also recently made——
Mr. JOHNSON. OK. Well, let me stop you right there and move
on.
In 2019, the FDA’s drug shortages task force put out a report to
mitigate—on how to mitigate drug strategies. How useful were
those recommendations in confronting the drug shortage challenges
posed by the pandemic under the previous administration?
Ms. CLOWERS. They were useful in that providing steps that both
FDA could take as well as the private sector in terms of risk man-
agement and better contracting.
Mr. JOHNSON. Was the FDA able to take those steps that were
recommended under the previous——
Ms. CLOWERS. They are taking——
Mr. JOHNSON [Continuing]. Under the previous administration?
Ms. CLOWERS. They are in the process of implementing those rec-
ommendations, and I can report back to you as we get more infor-
mation about the status.
Mr. JOHNSON. OK. Well, I know that you don’t want to comment
about the previous administration. But the FDA was not equipped
to predict drug shortages caused by former President Trump, who
incessantly tweeted unproven assertions that certain drugs were ef-
fective in treating COVID–19. Trump threatened the health of hun-
dreds of millions by spreading false information about treatments
for COVID–19 and creating mass demand for drugs that patients
with lupus or rheumatoid arthritis relied upon.
And his assertions led to widespread shortages of those medica-
tions across the country, and he didn’t stop there, though. He went
further, contacting the FDA and bullying the Administrator into
issuing an emergency order allowing the use of those drugs to treat
50
COVID–19, when, in fact, there was no evidence that those drugs
were efficacious. These drugs were more than just ineffective, they
could have potentially caused dangerous side effects depending on
the patient.
Mr. Dodaro, do you think or do you believe—or let me ask you
this. How did Trump’s actions constitute a direct public health
threat?
Mr. DODARO. Well, I mean—there—you know, I mean, my belief
is in science, and I think that the scientists should speak out on
these issues and that there needs to be authoritative scientific un-
derpinning of decisions we’ve heard.
Mr. JOHNSON. And let me ask you this question. In your opinion,
do actions taken by the FDA Administrator, pursuant to President
Trump’s order, merit further investigation.
Mr. DODARO. We are actually looking at the political influence on
FDA and CDC, and we’ll be reporting our results to the Congress.
Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you, and I yield back. Thank you, Madam
Chair.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. The
gentlelady from the great state of New York, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, is
now recognized.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Thank you very much, Chairwoman Malo-
ney.
And thank you, Mr. Dodaro, for coming in front of us today and
offering your expertise in some of these issues, emerging issues
that we should be keeping an eye out for.
Now you are the Comptroller General of the United States. Cor-
rect?
Mr. DODARO. That’s correct.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. And you know, for some of my constituents
in community watching at home, that means, among your many
other responsibilities, you kind of keep an eye on the books for the
United States. Would that be fair to say in a broader sense?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Books and programs, all Federal activity.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Wonderful. Thank you.
So, before I begin, Madam Chairwoman, I would like to ask for
unanimous consent to submit a Pro Publica article on Facebook on
enforcing tax law and a letter from 88 national organizations urg-
ing President Biden and Congress to invest in fair enforcement of
the tax law to the record.
Chairwoman MALONEY. Without objection.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Thank you. Thank you very much.
So, Mr. Dodaro, let us talk about taxes. If I was the CEO pres-
ently of a large international corporation that was founded here in
the United States and wanted to manipulate my taxes and park
the profits somewhere else, do you think I would be able to get
away with that in our current system?
Mr. DODARO. Well, there’s a lot of potential loopholes in the cur-
rent system that can be exploited.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Thank you. And you know, actually, accord-
ing to this Pro Publica article, it seems that some records have
been unearthed, and Sheryl Sandberg wrote in April, an April 2008
email that ‘‘My experience is that by not having a European center
51
and running everything through the U.S., it is costly in terms of
taxes.’’
And Facebook’s head of tax actually replied to Sandberg in these
records that the company needed to find a ‘‘low-tax jurisdiction to
park profits.’’ And it found that jurisdiction in Ireland, where its
tax rate is near zero.
Now why would Facebook, do you think, want to do that?
Mr. DODARO. Well, there’s different tax advantages. I’m going to
have—Mr. Mihm is our expert in the tax area. I’m going to ask him
to help comment.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Sure, of course.
Mr. DODARO. Because we’ve looked at some offshoring kind of
issues. Chris?
Mr. MIHM. Thank you, sir. And yes, ma’am. We have looked at
offshoring and, as you are suggesting, that there are various tax
advantages to where major corporations claim that their businesses
are taking place. And they are fully aware of those tax advantages,
and they use those to their advantage to minimize the amount of
taxes that they have to pay.
So, that is an important consideration in business decisions. Yes,
ma’am.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Thank you so much, and I appreciate that
answer. You know, and I would actually kind of contest this term
‘‘tax advantage,’’ because it may be an advantage to an individual
corporation, but we currently have an enormous tax gap in the
United States. Would you say that that is correct, Mr. Dodaro?
Mr. DODARO. That’s correct.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. And so weakened tax enforcement actually
rigs this economy against workers. It seems as though we are
starting to see a pattern where the IRS is starting to go a little bit
more after lower-income people that target the EITC, and this is
kind of referenced due to the lack of resources that the IRS cur-
rently has. Would that be fair to say?
Mr. DODARO. Well, the amount of enforcement efforts and audit-
ing of the tax returns has been going down as a percentage. I’m
not sure what the current mix is.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Yes, and so it seems like companies like
Facebook have kept billions of dollars in tax breaks through tactics
like offshore tax evasion. But working families are struggling to
pay rent, put food on the table, and stay alive. And in fact, we are
constantly told that we cannot afford tuition-free public colleges,
expansion of healthcare in the United States because we can’t af-
ford it.
The official estimates peg the national tax gap at $381 billion per
year, but the former Commissioner Charles Rossotti estimates that
it is now closer to $600 billion.
Mr. Dodaro, does any other item on the GAO’s High-Risk List
come anywhere close to having a $600 billion impact on the Fed-
eral budget?
Mr. DODARO. Not any one single item alone.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. So, this seems to be one of the largest areas
of having a negative impact on our Federal budget. It is tax eva-
sion and other sorts of——
52
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Yes, there are two others that have potential
large areas. One is healthcare, improper payments in healthcare,
which are over $100 billion a year. And the defense weapon sys-
tems, where there is a portfolio of $1.8 trillion.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate
it.
Mr. DODARO. Madam Chair, Madam Chair, would it be possible
for me to have five minutes before we continue?
Chairwoman MALONEY. Certainly. We will recess for five min-
utes.
[Recess.]
Chairwoman MALONEY. We’re now in session. The gentleman
from Texas, Mr. Fallon, is recognized for five minutes.
Mr. FALLON. Madam Chair, thank you very much.
Comptroller General Dodaro, thank you for taking the time. It
has been a fascinating committee hearing. And thank you for the
important work that you are doing and the service you are pro-
viding to our country and our taxpayers.
I have got a couple of questions. Medicare has been on the High-
Risk List for over 30 years, and I am not surprised because when
I was in the Texas legislature, it was one of the things that I
learned about was the fraud that we saw just at our level in the
state and in Texas. And it was, according to our Inspector General,
in the hundreds of millions of dollars provable and potentially and
probably in the low billions.
And again, that is just Texas. So, I shudder to think what the
actual costs are when you look at 50 states.
So, my first question is, do you share my concern about the mas-
sive potential and actual fraud that could exist within the Medicaid
program, Medicare program and the process? And if you do, do you
have any idea of possibly a ballpark figure of what that realistic
potential fraud could be across the country?
Mr. DODARO. Yes. Well, I share your concern about it clearly,
both for Medicare and Medicaid, all right, in those two areas. I do
not have a figure for you. It’s hard to calculate. There are figures
on improper payments that are made. These are payments that
should not have been made or made in the wrong amounts.
Now they would include—Now any fraud would be an improper
payment by definition, but not all improper payments are fraud be-
cause you have to prove an intent and criminality. Last year, the
amount of improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid combined
were over $100 billion, all right? But again, that’s not all fraud, but
it’s indicative of an issue.
And I believe that the amount of improper payments estimated
for Medicaid is an underestimate. The numbers are big.
Mr. FALLON. I would also like to share with the committee and
the other members that when I asked our Inspector General a very
innocent question, what I thought which was, when someone is au-
dited, in this case, Medicaid, what percentage of those physicians
or the offices that are giving the medical care had their billing low-
ered the next month? And it was 100 percent, all of them, which
is alarming, obviously, for clear reasons.
But the Medicare program has been on the list, as I mentioned
earlier, year after year for three decades. What suggestions, if any,
53
would you have today that we could implement to finally hold the
Medicare program accountable and, as a result, of course, reduce
this massive taxpayer theft and reform Medicare and Medicaid so
that they can actually earn their way off the list?
Mr. DODARO. Well, there’s a couple of things. One is we think
they should expand the prior authorization. They tested prior au-
thorizations. This provides greater assurance that you are spending
the money for a legitimate purpose to a legitimate provider for a
legitimate medical reason before you spend the money. You don’t
have to worry about trying to get it back later.
It’s been proven in pilot projects, but it hasn’t been expanded be-
cause it will save money and it won’t affect the services’ timeliness
or the services to the individual if done properly.
Second, it’s been shown that recovery auditors who actually audit
some of these things after the fact can audit prepayment in some
of these areas. That will reduce that issue as well. So, those are
two recommendations off the bat.
The other reason Medicare is on the High-Risk List is that it’s
undergoing a transformation right now to sort of pay people for not
quantity of services, but the quality of services, and that trans-
formation is underway and not anywhere near complete. But let
me ask Ms. Clowers if she has any other recommendations. She’s
our healthcare head.
Mr. FALLON. Yes, thank you. Thank you.
Mr. DODARO. Nikki?
Ms. CLOWERS. Yes. One more recommendation in the Medicare
area would be for CMS to do more work on their risk adjustment
scores. That is when we see coding differences between fee-for-serv-
ice, for example, versus then the payments that are made under
managed care or the Medicare Advantage. We want to make sure
that those coding differences are taken into account so we are not
overpaying for the services provided. We have a recommendation in
that area.
And then on the Medicaid front, the Comptroller General has
also mentioned this a little bit earlier. But in the managed care
area, there is not a sufficient medical review of the payments and
services that are made, and we think that area needs a great deal
of attention as the care that is being provided through managed
care now accounts for almost half of all Medicaid spending.
Mr. FALLON. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Madam
Chair. I yield back.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. The
gentlelady from Missouri, Ms. Bush, is recognized for five minutes.
Ms. Bush, you are now recognized.
Ms. BUSH. Thank you, Madam Chair.
St. Louis and I thank you for convening this hearing today, and
thank you to Mr. Dodaro for being here.
I will ask today for the thousands of people who urgently need
a voice in this room, the environmental violence of the Depart-
ments of Energy and Defense has emblazoned my community with
extremely hazardous radioactive waste. Nothing could fully capture
what it was like for people to find out that their—that nearly ev-
eryone from their high school was sick with rare cancers or dead.
That is real life for people along Coldwater Creek in St. Louis.
54
The Department of Energy knew that Coldwater Creek was dan-
gerously contaminated in the 1960’s. Mr. Dodaro, based on what
you know about DOE environmental liabilities, would you guess
that the creek is cleaned up today?
Mr. DODARO. Well, there hasn’t been as much progress as I think
there needs to be made, and the cost to the Government to clean
up keeps going up, despite spending billions of dollars, because
they don’t really have a risk-based approach to addressing those
issues.
Ms. BUSH. OK well yes. You are right. Yes, it is certainly not.
The CDC has estimated that as many as 350,000 people in North
County, my community, have been exposed to radioactive waste.
The creek runs through the Florissant area and several other
towns in my district. We are not talking about a distant problem.
I am in the room, actually. I lived by this creek, and the basement
of my townhouse would flood with potentially radioactive water all
the time. My son’s room was in that basement.
Mr. Dodaro, based on what you know about these two depart-
ments, would you take over the lease at that townhouse, or would
you take your kids to the nearby playground?
Mr. DODARO. Based on the circumstances that you’re explaining,
I don’t think so.
Ms. BUSH. Well, and I am a nurse. I would never let you do it.
One day, I opened my door, and there were butterflies, dozens,
lying on the ground with their wings opened, like nothing I had
ever seen. I realized something must be very, very wrong, but we
had no idea what was happening.
Most people still don’t know what is happening even right now.
The Army Corps of Engineers is slowly conducting a cleanup in St.
Louis under the FUSRAP program. They have estimated that some
black and brown communities won’t be cleaned up for 20 years.
Eyewitness accounts state that the Corps and contractors like
those mentioned in the report have been seen picking random
houses on a street to test soil without even notifying neighbors who
are growing gardens. There are still no signs, no signs at the creek
warning people of the dangers.
Mr. Dodaro, would you say that the DOE has enough money to
post some type of warning signs along the creek that is giving peo-
ple rare cancers or at least what we believe to be causing it?
Mr. DODARO. I’ll ask—I’ll ask Mr. Gaffigan to answer further,
but DOE has one of the largest budgets in the Government. So, I
would think they could afford a sign, but Mark?
Mr. GAFFIGAN. I would only add the reason we put this on the
list is because we think this is just the tip of the iceberg. We think
there are a lot more places like Coldwater Creek around the coun-
try that need to be identified, and we need to figure out to what
degree we are going to clean them up.
Ms. BUSH. Thank you. Thank you.
The Department of Energy is a ‘‘responsible party’’ for Coldwater
Creek. We have heard that the DOE set aside the maximum
amount of money, but then deemed it was not all needed. My con-
stituents and I, we want to know where does the supposedly
unneeded money go? Mr. Dodaro?
Mr. DODARO. I’m going to ask Mr. Gaffigan on that one.
55
Ms. BUSH. OK.
Mr. GAFFIGAN. Well, we have been critical that DOE has not
taken a risk-based approach to this, you know, identifying all the
sites throughout the country and treating it in sort of a risk-based
approach. And the fact that communities are feeling left out is not
a good sign.
Ms. BUSH. No, it is not. Thank you.
I have one final question. Mr. Dodaro, if you were me, rep-
resenting hundreds of thousands of people with potential or con-
firmed toxic exposure, what would you do to massively expedite
DOE?
Mr. DODARO. I mean, I think Congress is empowered to get an-
swers from DOE about what their plans are and what they’re in-
tended to do. So, if I was a Member of Congress, I’d insist that they
provide answers to the questions to satisfy you about what their
plans are and what the timeframes are for implementing those
plans.
Ms. BUSH. Thank you, Mr. Dodaro. I will be following up with
further questions, a lot of questions.
And I yield back.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentlelady yields back. And the gen-
tleman from Kentucky, Mr. Comer, is now recognized.
Mr. COMER. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And Mr. Dodaro, thank you for your time. I know you have to
leave, and you have been with us all day and a press conference
before that. I just wanted to ask a real brief question.
Has the COVID–19 pandemic led to an increase in drug abuse,
and that is what contributed to the addition of a new area on the
GAO list and that area being the national efforts to prevent, re-
spond to, and recover from drug misuse?
Mr. DODARO. I want to be clear on this. We were going to add
that area before the pandemic, and we announced our intention to
do that March 2020. So, it wasn’t a result of the pandemic that we
added the drug misuse area, but the pandemic has complicated
that issue.
Mr. COMER. Isn’t it true the number of drug overdoses has in-
creased during the pandemic from March to May of—March 2019
to May 2020?
Mr. DODARO. That’s true. That’s true.
Mr. COMER. Or March 2020 to May 2021, yes?
Mr. DODARO. Yes, right. Right. But if you look at it, we have a
chart in our report, Congressman, that shows the rate of drug in-
creases were going sort of like this. It was, you know, on a trajec-
tory. It dropped slightly in 2018, but it bounced back in 2019 to go
increase again.
So, it was on a very disturbing trend pattern before the pan-
demic, and it’s apparently likely to get worse once all the final data
is in going forward.
Mr. COMER. So, what do you think the Federal Government’s re-
sponse needs to be to this spike in drug abuse?
Mr. DODARO. Well, I think we need to double down on our efforts.
We need to have a comprehensive national strategy. We need to en-
gage—there are 12 different agencies in the Federal Government
that are considered part of this implementation effort. We need to
56
engage the states, localities, and the private sector in this area be-
cause it affects businesses. It affects all parts of our economy.
So, we need to really make a concerted effort over time with the
proper resources and investment in order to arrest this disturbing
trend.
Mr. COMER. Well, I would add to that, in my opinion, that I be-
lieve taking steps to reopen the economy and getting people back
to work certainly would seem to help the situation as well.
But thank you again for being here. I know we have extended
this meeting beyond the time that we set forth, but I do appreciate
your service.
And Madam Chair, I yield back.
Chairwoman MALONEY. The gentleman yields back. And in clos-
ing, I want to thank the Comptroller for his testimony, his service,
his report, his press conference earlier today, and I know he is tes-
tifying shortly before the Senate on the report also.
I also want to commend my colleagues for participating in this
important conversation, and without objection, all members have
five legislative days within which to submit additional written
questions for the witness—to the chair, which will be forwarded to
the witness for his response. I ask our witnesses to please respond
as promptly as you are able to.
And this hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:51 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
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