"Overlapping government programs cost billions".....

[sofa king]

7. And they're all underfunded.

I recall helping to cobble together federal funding to keep some absolutely essential medical facilities open on an Indian reservation, and attending a meeting in which there were representatives from DHHS, IHS, BIA, Interior, Commerce, staff from an entire state Congressional delegation, and the President of a tribe, all serviced by a cloud of lawyers and paralegals.

Collectively, their salaries far outweighed the costs being debated. But no single one of those entities I named above had anything close to the few hundred thousand dollars that was needed.

It was the end of a fiscal year not long after the government had been shut down a couple of times, and far more complicated than I describe. But what I personally witnessed was desperately underfunded agencies "overlapping" because none of them had any money.

And those were the good old days!