About

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has earned a reputation as America’s #1 taxpayer watchdog organization with more than 1 million members and supporters nationwide.  Founded in 1984 by the late businessman J. Peter Grace and late Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jack Anderson, CAGW is a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that grew out of the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, also known as the Grace Commission. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan directed the Grace Commission to “work like tireless bloodhounds to root out government inefficiency and waste of tax dollars.”  For two years, 161 corporate executives and community leaders led an army of 2,000 volunteers on a waste hunt through the federal government.  The search was funded entirely by voluntary contributions of $76 million from the private sector; it cost taxpayers nothing.

The Grace Commission made 2,478 recommendations which, if implemented, would save $424.4 billion over three years.  The 47 volumes and 21,000 pages of the Grace Commission Report constituted a vision of an efficient, well-managed government that is accountable to taxpayers.  CAGW has worked to make that vision a reality and, in 27 years, has helped save taxpayers $1.2 trillion through the implementation of Grace Commission findings and other cost-cutting recommendations.

CAGW pursues its mission to eliminate the waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement of tax dollars and stop the out-of-control deficit spending that threatens our nation’s financial future by publishing original research and authoring a variety of publications, including investigative reports, the Government WasteWatch newspaper, Wastewatcher, and a renowned annual exposé of pork-barrel spending — the Congressional Pig Book.

CAGW is nationally recognized as the source of information on government waste.  Since 1984, CAGW has laid the intellectual and cultural groundwork making responsible fiscal policy and our elected officials’ accountability to taxpayers national priorities and brought unprecedented exposure to how the government spends tax dollars.  CAGW’s waste findings have been featured in national newspapers and news magazines, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, as well as on all of the nightly network television news programs and on other national network and cable news shows, such as “20/20,” “60 Minutes,” “Dateline,” “Larry King Live,” “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” and “The O’Reilly Factor.”

CAGW accepts no government funds and relies entirely on charitable contributions to support its work.  View CAGW’s Financial Information here.