Government Efficiency & Accountability
Published: February 2025
The data makes the case that the status quo cannot continue.
Top 5 Contractors
44%
of all federal contract spending
No-Bid Contracts
$74B
awarded without competition in FY2025
Spending Growth
+38%
in federal contract spending since FY2020
Improper Payments
$162B
in FY2024 alone across 68 programs
The federal government spends $11.2 trillion per year. It cannot tell you where hundreds of billions of those dollars go. The Government Accountability Office has been documenting these failures for decades. The question is not whether efficiency is needed — it is why it took this long.
The Case for Efficiency
Government efficiency is not a partisan issue — it is a math problem. Federal spending has grown relentlessly for decades, through administrations of both parties. The budget doubled from $3.5 trillion in 2010 to over $6.8 trillion in 2024, while the national debt crossed $34 trillion. At some point, the trajectory becomes unsustainable.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was created to confront this reality. Its mandate is straightforward: audit how the government spends money, identify waste and redundancy, and recommend cuts. This is not radical — it is what every business does as a matter of course. The federal government is the only trillion-dollar organization on earth that has never passed a clean financial audit.
Critics argue that efficiency efforts are cover for cutting programs people depend on. That concern deserves a serious answer. But the data shows that hundreds of billions are lost every year to fraud, improper payments, and duplicated programs — money that never reaches anyone. Cutting waste is not the same as cutting services. In fact, waste crowds out the services that actually work.
Contractor Concentration
Federal contracting is dominated by a handful of companies. The top five contractors — Lockheed Martin, Optum, Electric Boat, TriWest Healthcare, and McKesson — receive roughly 44% of all federal contract dollars. Lockheed Martin alone received $34 billion in FY2025. When a few companies control this much of the pipeline, competition erodes, prices inflate, and accountability vanishes.
The Revolving Door
Many of these contractors employ former government officials who previously oversaw the agencies now awarding them contracts. This revolving door between government service and private contracting creates relationships that prioritize incumbents over competition. The result: taxpayers pay more, and new entrants are locked out.
The No-Bid Problem
In FY2025, $74 billion in federal contracts were awarded through sole-source procurement — without competitive bidding. These no-bid contracts exist for legitimate reasons: classified programs, genuine emergencies, or unique technical capabilities. But when the same companies receive billions year after year without competition, the exception has become the rule.
The Department of Defense accounts for the vast majority of no-bid spending. "National security" is the justification that eliminates the price pressure designed to protect taxpayers. Whether that justification holds up to scrutiny — or has become a convenient excuse — is exactly the kind of question that efficiency efforts should answer.
$74 billion in contracts awarded without competition. That is more than the entire budget of the Department of Education.
Spending Never Goes Back Down
Federal contract spending has grown 38% since FY2020 — a period that includes the COVID emergency surge. But even after the emergency ended, spending did not return to pre-pandemic levels. This is the ratchet effect: every crisis becomes the new baseline. Emergency spending becomes permanent spending. Temporary programs become permanent programs. And the budget only moves in one direction.
USAID's budget is a case study. It tripled from $15 billion in 2017 to over $50 billion by 2023 — an extraordinary expansion with limited public scrutiny. When DOGE began reviewing the agency, questions about where that money went were met with resistance rather than transparency. An agency that cannot explain a threefold budget increase is an agency that needs oversight, not protection.
What Accountability Looks Like
Real accountability starts with transparency. Every dollar the government spends should be traceable from appropriation to expenditure. Every contract should be searchable by any taxpayer. Every agency should pass a financial audit — something most cannot do today. The data that powers this site comes from USASpending.gov, a step in the right direction. But data availability is not the same as accountability.
Accountability means consequences. When an agency reports $162 billion in improper payments, someone should be responsible. When a contractor receives billions without competition, the justification should be public. When spending triples in six years, the results should be measurable. The federal government collects $4.9 trillion in taxes every year. Taxpayers deserve to know whether that money is being spent wisely — and the data suggests it often is not.
Whether DOGE succeeds or fails, the underlying problem remains: the federal government is too large and too opaque to manage without structural reform. Efficiency is not about ideology — it is about competence. And the numbers speak for themselves.