More Government Cars Than Employees

W A S H I N G T O N, April 19 -- Enterprise, America's biggest car rental company, owns more than half a million rental vehicles. That's a huge fleet, but not as enormous as the fleet of vehicles paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

An agency by agency inventory done for the year 2000 shows the federal government owning more than 602,000 cars, trucks and vans. According to the Office of Management and Budget, that's one vehicle for every three federal employees.

"You look across these numbers and clearly we've got some excess going on we need to root out," said OMB Director Mitch Daniels.

The number of cars added to the government's fleet each year varies widely. The OMB says about 19,000 vehicles were bought or leased in the year 2000 and 63,000 were acquired the year before.

The cost to buy, lease and maintain that inventory? More than $2 billion a year.

"It's enough to drive taxpayers crazy," said Tom Schatz, who heads the government watchdog group, Citizens Against Government Waste. "No one knows what they have. They don't know if they need it. It's just one example of many of lack of control, lack of accountability in Washington."

In an effort to establish accountability, Daniels sent letters last week to federal agencies, asking them for "additional information and ideas to tighten control." The letter notes that one agency, the Energy Department, actually has more vehicles than employees — about 15,000 employees and 16,000 cars. Energy Department officials said the numbers are misleading because it had 100,000 contract workers at its 31 far-flung facilities outside of Washington. That includes government laboratories and nuclear weapon manufacturing sites scattered from Oakridge, Tenn., to Hanford, Wash., to Los Alamos, N.M.

Of all the federal agencies, the Department of Defense has the most vehicles — 180,000 of them. And that does not include military vehicles.

Other agencies note that big jobs require big fleets. The Interior Department, for example, has 25,000 vehicles, but it manages a half-billion acres of land.