Does that waste actually exist?
Depends on who you ask. (There's some people who argue that Medicare "fraud" doesn't exist. It's just an accounting thing.) I can find plenty of "waste" in your personal budget, but you're going to tell me that stuff are necessities or important. And you're going to fight a lot harder to stop me than I will to "correct" you. Even if you agree with me that buying fifteen thousand
banana slicers was a bad idea, you still want the money to spend next year.
Just look at stuff in the military budget, you're paying people to produce things the military doesn't want (so they often ship it to other countries) because it's built or stored in certain districts and you can't cut the spending out of the budget even if the program ends because the military still wants to spend the money just not on that thing. (And then you have the dopes in the program who certainly don't want that sweet gig to end and be put to actual work.)
Or look at the shit fit thrown over PBS which is less than 1/10th of 1% of the budget. There were all sorts of people crying that making any cuts would turn inner city kids brains into mush because they wouldn't be able to watch Sesame Street, NOVA, Austin City Limits or that dopey white guy who travels around Europe like an idiot. (Even though basically no major PBS station relies on federal funding as even a quarter of their funding. And many of the shows are profitable or funded on their own.) To ask why we even need government funded entertainment makes you even more of a monster, worse than Isiah Thomas. It only gets worse as the size of the program/entitlement scales up. At a certain point cutting $12 billion here on buildings or $20 billion on duplicate services isn't even worth the trouble since it barely even makes a dent in in the future upward trajectory.
One of the more surreal aspects of the Romney campaign was him standing in front of a big banner that said "CUT THE SPENDING" while he's whining about how Obama has gutted the military budget (by increasing spending but not as fast as "we should") and how he wanted to lock it in at a minimum of 4% of GDP forever.