The Government Can’t Even Count Its Own Programs, And That’s Costing You

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has been sitting on a 15-year-old legal requirement to publish a complete inventory of every federal program it runs. The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010, signed into law by President Obama in January 2011, gave OMB a simple but powerful mandate: keep track of the money flying out the door, and tell the public. The idea was straightforward. Waste cannot be cut if it cannot be counted. OMB still has not published the list.

A report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in March confirms the failure in stark terms: the OMB has not yet fully addressed 13 of the 20 statutory requirements the law demands. The inventory currently covers more than 2,600 federal programs and claims to represent more than $7 trillion in federal spending, but that figure is itself misleading, because OMB improperly combined obligations, outlays, and tax expenditures into a single number. Entire categories of programs are simply missing. The inventory does not yet include Defense programs, foreign assistance, or acquisition spending. Defense alone accounts for roughly half of all discretionary federal spending: $831 billion in fiscal year 2025.

The bottom line: you cannot cut what you cannot count.

GAO testified before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship on March 18, 2026, during Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R-Iowa) Sunshine Week hearing. This is where she exposed $77.5 billion in “Other Transaction Agreements,” which are special defense and research contracts that the government has been hiding from public spending databases between fiscal years 2021 and 2025. That same day, the GAO delivered companion testimony to the committee reaffirming that the inventory lacks Defense, foreign assistance, and acquisition programs, and calling on Congress to act.

In testimony submitted for the record at the same hearing, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF) laid out precisely what is at stake. A complete inventory would enable Congress to identify overlapping programs across agencies, flag spending on programs whose authorizations have lapsed, and make the government-wide spending data on USAspending.gov more consistent and useful. Without it, meaningful fiscal reform remains nearly impossible. As NTUF noted, “Taxpayers deserve a clear and complete accounting of how their money is spent.”

The stakes are not abstract. The GAO’s own acting Comptroller General told lawmakers at the hearing that Congress needs three things to address programmatic waste: a comprehensive inventory, information on program effectiveness, and congressional willingness to hold agencies accountable. Without the first, the other two are impossible to achieve. When Defense programs go unlisted, there is no program-level accountability for the Pentagon’s budget. When acquisition programs (which purchase everything from aircraft carriers to office supplies) are absent, the door stays open for the runaway contracting that has plagued the federal government for decades.

It is worth pausing to appreciate the hypocrisy of this failure. The federal government demands meticulous financial records from private citizens and businesses under penalty of law. The Internal Revenue Service requires documentation going back years. Federal contractors face rigorous reporting requirements. And yet the OMB, which has had 15 years and multiple administrations to comply with a straightforward legal requirement, has not bothered to respond to GAO’s questions. As the March 2026 GAO report noted, OMB did not provide any comments on the report at all.

The good news is that Congress is starting to take notice of the problem. On March 18, 2026, Reps. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.) and Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) introduced the bipartisan Expedited Transparency Act (H.R. 7974), which would require all federal spending disbursements to be publicly posted on USAspending.gov within three business days, down from the current 30-day window. Sen. Ernst has also introduced the Cost Openness and Spending Transparency (COST) Act to require public price tags on all taxpayer-funded projects, and her Stop Secret Spending Act has already cleared the House Oversight Committee.

The Taxpayers Protection Alliance urges Congress to go further. Setting a hard deadline for OMB to complete the program inventory, with automatic funding penalties for non-compliance, is the only way to convert a 15-year-old statutory obligation into reality. Voluntary compliance has failed. Repeated GAO recommendations have gone unanswered. It is time for consequences.

Serious fiscal reform requires a complete map of what the government does. An inventory is not red tape; it is the foundation on which every oversight effort, every duplication review, and every legitimate spending cut must rest. Congress has already written the law. OMB just needs to follow it, and Congress needs to make sure that happens.