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Senate Passes Bipartisan Legislation from Senators Hassan, Braun to Reduce Wasteful Spending in the Federal Government

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Senate passed bipartisan legislation introduced by Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Chair of the HSGAC Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight, and Senator Mike Braun (R-IN) to create a system for identifying and eliminating wasteful federal programs.

“Duplicative or wasteful programs in the federal government often go on for too long without being eliminated,” said Senator Hassan. “I introduced this bipartisan bill with Senator Braun because we need to ensure that the federal government is identifying and stopping these wasteful programs. I am pleased the Senate passed this commonsense legislation to save taxpayer dollars and make our government more efficient, and I urge the House to pass it.”

The bipartisan Identifying and Eliminating Wasteful Programs Act would create a system to facilitate agency identification of wasteful programs and assist Congress with developing legislation to eliminate those programs. This system would require the following steps:

  1. First, agencies identify wasteful or duplicative programs to potentially eliminate, and present that list to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB),
  2. Next, OMB works with Congress to determine whether the program should continue or not, and
  3. Congress, with the assistance of OMB and agencies, draft legislation to eliminate or consolidate the programs identified.

Senator Hassan has focused on fiscal responsibility and cutting waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars in the federal government – working across the aisle to cut hundreds of billions in wasteful spending. As Chair of the Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight Subcommittee, she introduced bipartisan legislation to save taxpayer dollars and cut waste by eliminating duplicative government programs based on Government Accountability Office recommendations. She was named a “Fiscal Hero” by Fix the Debt, a project of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, as well as the “Most Bipartisan Senator” by the nonpartisan Lugar Center.

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