GAO Duplication Report Highlights How to Save Taxpayers Money

By now, most everyone knows that merely ending waste, fraud, and abuse will neither balance the budget nor pay off the nearly $35-trillion national debt. Nonetheless, Washington has a duty to avoid wasting taxpayer dollars. Released last month, the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) annual report on duplications and cost savings highlights inefficiencies and redundancies in federal governance. The elimination of said redundancies could save taxpayers billions of dollars.

Implementing the watchdog’s recommendations has proved worthwhile before. “As of March 2024, Congress and agencies had fully addressed 1,341 (66 percent) of the 2,018 matters and recommendations GAO identified from 2011-2024 and partially addressed 139 (about 7 percent),” the report says. “This has resulted in financial and other benefits, such as improved interagency coordination and reduced mismanagement, fraud, waste, and abuse.”

The GAO roughly estimates these efforts have “resulted in about $667 billion in financial benefits, an increase of about $71 billion from GAO’s last report on this topic.”

This year’s edition of the report identifies 112 additional new areas for congressional and administrative attention. Congress and agencies would do well to implement many of these recommendations. Governing well requires lawmakers to step out of the bright lights and TV greenrooms to do oft-ignored and boring work. For example, GAO says better use of predictive models to time and manage investments in, and upkeep of, federally owned buildings and infrastructure could save more than $100 million. “Federal agencies face challenges in managing their portfolios and may defer maintenance and repairs,” says the report. Perennially postponed maintenance can degrade agencies’ functioning and lead to higher long-term costs. Moreover, eliminating underutilized office space could supply an additional $10 million over a half decade.

Much of the report identifies many redundancies that add needlessly to federal spending. Simple inter-agency communication and collaboration can solve many of these problems. For example, “Federal agencies could save millions of dollars by regularly comparing their inventories of software license agreements currently in use to purchase records to reduce costs on duplicative or unnecessary software licenses,” the GAO says. Similarly, eliminating duplicative background checks could yield savings.

Cybersecurity appears multiple times in the report. GAO advises the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) to improve methods for sharing threat-related information and “to implement guidance to better manage fragmentation and improve its interagency collaboration efforts aimed at addressing risks to operational technology used in operating critical infrastructure, such as oil and gas distribution.”

The GAO’s report provided members of Congress and the administrative state with a useful resource, outlining how they, as ostensibly responsible trustees of money taken from hard-working Americans, can deploy that money efficiently and conscientiously. Now, it is their duty to act.