Government Waste

County supervisors Tuesday ordered the Department of Children and Family Services to fix problems highlighted by a recent audit that was sharply critical of the agency's purchasing practices. The Aug. 3 audit said the agency wasted more than $1 million on unnecessary or overpriced equipment and failed to adequately keep track of hundreds of thousands of dollars in supplies. Supervisors asked county auditors to determine which other departments should be similarly scrutinized.

A sweeping overhaul of state government demanded by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has missed a practical deadline for moving to the Legislature this session and probably will be delayed until 2005, officials said. Investigators for the "California Performance Review" failed to meet an April 30 target for getting the plan examined by the Little Hoover Commission, an advisory watchdog over state government operations.

In the latest call to arms in a crusade against wasteful city government, Los Angeles Councilman Joel Wachs on Thursday proposed consolidating the city's far-flung fuel tank storage system. He said that replacing current tanks with fewer, centralized, larger tanks could save up to $13 million over the next three years. At a news conference in front of a Lincoln Heights fire station fuel pump, he pointed at a similar pump across the street and others down the road at another city department.

A key agency charged with protecting the on-the-job health of 120 million Americans moved to the nation's capital last year to bring new attention to workplace hazards. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health got more attention than it bargained for: It's now on the congressional chopping block, accused of wasting taxpayer dollars. "We could lose the only federal agency mandated to conduct research and training in this field," said NIOSH Director Dr. Linda Rosenstock.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved spending $10,000 for a college think tank to identify wasteful duplications of services by county and city governments and special districts. The supervisors voted 4-0 to pay one-third of the cost for a three-month study of all county and local government services to find areas that could be streamlined or contracted out to private business.

A Los Angeles City Council committee investigating waste in City Hall heard city employees complain Wednesday about a burdensome purchasing process and prices for supplies and equipment that are up to twice the retail price. On its first day of testimony, the Government Efficiency Committee heard several stories of waste, ranging from a camera offered to narcotics investigators for nearly twice the price at a retail store to computer discs sold to the city at six times the retail price.

Federal investigators will tell Congress today that widespread waste and unnecessary payments are costing the Medicare program at least $4 billion a year. The General Accounting Office investigators will blame employers and insurance companies for shifting their bills to Medicare and will contend that Medicare pays too much for laboratory services and for work performed in hospitals by radiologists, anesthesiologists and pathologists.