53407697.

doc
Page 1 of 2

March 16, 2008

US chief auditor leaves, giving dire warning

about national debt
By DAVID S BRODER
Washington Post

It was sheer coincidence that David M. Walker spent his last day Wednesday as
comptroller general of the United States at the same time that the House and Senate
were beginning to debate their budget resolutions for next year.
As the head of the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress,
Walker has been perhaps the most outspoken official in Washington warning of the
fiscal train wreck that awaits this country unless it mends its ways.
The budget resolutions approved last week both envisage an increase in the deficit
next year. The Senate predicts $366 billion, the House $340 billion. Meanwhile, over
the next five years, independent estimates are that the national debt, already $9
trillion, will grow by $2 trillion more. Almost half the government debt owed to banks
or individuals is held by foreign creditors, notably China, Japan and the OPEC nations,
up from 13 percent five years ago.
Both resolutions forecast a balanced budget in 2012, but they use the same
dubiously optimistic assumptions President Bush employed to make the same claim
for his tax-and-spending proposal. Once again, the hard choices are being pushed off
to some hazy future.
For much of his nine years as comptroller general, and with increasing urgency in
recent times, Walker has been warning policymakers in Washington and audiences
around the country that this nation is courting disaster by not paying its bills.
Last week, he cautioned in a speech that "largely due to the aging of the baby
boomers and rising health care costs, the United States faces decades of red ink. . . .
If the United States continues as it has, policymakers will eventually have to raise
taxes or slash government services that U.S. citizens depend on and take for
granted. . . . Over time, the U.S. government could be reduced to doing little more
than mailing out Social Security checks to retirees and paying interest on the
massive national debt."
Even as a nonpartisan employee of Congress, Walker has been blunt enough to say,
again and again, that "at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and on both sides of the
political aisle, there are too few leaders who face the facts" about this fiscal mess.
When I went to see Walker two days before he left office, he told me he had begun to
realize he was pushing the limits on advocacy at the GAO. So he jumped at the
opportunity offered him by Peter G. Peterson, the son of Greek immigrants who made
a fortune as a Wall Street investment banker. Peterson has created a foundation
bearing his name and promised to fund it with $1 billion over a period of years.
Walker is now running it.
The foundation's main focus will be to spur action to curb the deficits, but other
target areas will include education, especially fiscal literacy and civics, energy
conservation and nonproliferation of nuclear and biological weapons.
53407697.doc
Page 2 of 2

With Peterson's backing, Walker said he will be able to do things his old job did not
allow -- "advocate specific solutions, build coalitions and put grass-roots pressure on
Washington."
Because others already have done "a lot of the basic research and analysis" needed
in these areas, Walker said the Peterson Foundation will emphasize the advocacy
role, especially with the business community and young people.
He said that his experience in 35 town meetings has convinced him that "the people
are ahead of the politicians" in their readiness to see the government discipline itself.
"But they don't know what we need to do."
Walker said that in his judgment, the United States "has no more than five or 10
years" to readjust its policies to stave off fiscal ruin. He said that "unless the next
president makes this a priority, this effort of ours won't make a difference." But he
said the public will have to demand a change of course, or politicians will continue to
shilly-shally.
The last time the broad public grasped the danger of budget deficits was in 1992,
when Ross Perot paid for half-hour television infomercials, complete with dramatic
charts and graphs, as part of his presidential campaign. That seeded the ground for
Bill Clinton's 1993 effort that succeeded briefly in wiping out those deficits.
Perot later gave Walker an autographed copy of one of those charts, as a tribute to a
legatee. Walker says the foundation will try to emulate Perot, using television, the
Internet and all other communication tools. No task is more important to our future.
Broder is a Washington Post columnist