Just in time for Christmas, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this month released its annual “Compendium of Unimplemented Recommendations.”

Get yours now on the HHS web site, free, minus the cost of printing 180 pages and the hours you’ll never get back trying to read it. Maybe a good white elephant present?

If you do read it — like we did — you’ll find a tome chock full of examples of the most perpetual yet easy-to-fix examples of waste in the massive federal programs Medicare and Medicaid.

For example, Medicare could save $23.6 billion over 10 years, authors estimate, by paying less money to hospitals that fail to make a reasonable effort to collect deductibles and coinsurance from people who could afford it.

Reports like the Compendium come out frequently. Few people realize how much effort the government puts into policing itself. The HHS inspector general’s office employs 1,700 people who idenfity fraud, waste and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid.

Few people realize it largely because the reports get names like this.

The U.S. Department of Defense last week released a report titled, “Accountability Was Missing for Government Property Procured on the Army’s Services Contract for Logistics Support of Stryker Vehicles.”

In English, the report found that the government lost track of $892 million worth of parts stored at a government-owned warehouse run by the company General Dynamics in Washington.

The parts were spare and repair parts from the project to build Stryker combat vehicles. They were not accounted for because government contract officers treated them as contractor-acquired property, while General Dynamics considered them government property.

Other recent report titles, these from the U.S. Government Accountabiliy Office:

— “James Webb Space Telescope: Actions Needed to Improve Cost Estimate and Oversight of Test and Integration.” Translation: One of NASA’s most expensive projects will cost $8.8 billion and launch in 2018, almost nine times the cost and more than a decade later than originally estimated.

— “National Technical Information Service’s Dissemination of Technical Reports Needs Congressional Attention.” Translation: A federal agency that maintains scientific records and is supposed to be self-sustaining has had its costs exceeding its revenue for most of the past 11 years.

Coburn’s list of wasteful spending

On the other end of the spectrum is Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, colorful goverment waste critic.

His recent report, “Safety at Any Price: Report on Questionable Grant Spending at Department of Homeland Security” is a little more geared toward public consumption. It features Lego men and R2D2 assembling in front of the U.S. Capitol.

The press release announcing it kicks off with the “Zombie Apocolypse Training” that was part of a week-long conference at Paradise Point Resort and Spa in San Diego.

In Ohio, Coburn’s report singles out an underwater robot purchased by Columbus for $98,000 as an example of the wastefulness of a program that gives Homeland Security grants to cities. Columbus is not near any major bodies of water, the report notes.

These programs have cost more than $35 billion since 2003, Coburn says, without any way of measuring whether they are succeeding at making Americans safer.

He specifically called out a program that steers money to large cities including some, like Toledo, which “aren’t traditionally considered the targets of terrorists” but received $15 million since 2003. In total, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo received more than $161 million since 2003, according to the report.

“At a time when our $16 trillion national debt is our greatest national security threat, we must make sure that all programs, especially those meant to prevent terrorism, are achieving their mission. This report shows that too often so-called security spending is making our nation less secure by directing scarce dollars to low-priority projects and low-risk areas,” Coburn said.

Coburn was also a critic of one of the I-Team’s favorite alleged excesses: $325,000 spent by California universities to contstruct a robot squirrel named, aptly, “RoboSquirrel.”

Zombies and robot squirrels. Now that’s how you get a report read.