The Government Accountability Office is telling Congress that better management of existing federal programs could save billions of dollars in the coming years.
GAO, in its 13th annual report on fragmentation, overlap and duplication, is adding 100 new actions to its list of recommendations that, if implemented, could lead to significant cost savings.
The watchdog agency estimates that agencies achieved more than $600 billion in financial benefits in more than a decade by taking steps outlined by GAO. Nearly $47 billion of those cost savings took place in 2022.
The Defense Department accounts for more GAO recommendations than any other agency, and has saved $195 billion through its actions over the past 13 years.
The GAO report identifies some actions that some departments and agencies can take up on their own. But the real cost savings come from multiple agencies working together to unravel a tangled web of federal programs that share many of the same goals.
GAO, for example, found that more than 30 federal agencies and programs are involved in disaster recovery.
Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last week that better coordination across agencies on disaster response would lead to improved service delivery.
“It’s very rare these days that there’s a problem that doesn’t need coordination across the federal government. It’s become increasingly so,” Dodaro told the subcommittee on emerging threats and spending oversight. “There’s not a good institutional commitment.”
