Sneak Preview: GAO Promotes More Federal Efforts To Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article. Although Congress and federal agencies over the last decade have taken measures in response to Government Accountability Office (GAO) report recommendations to save the government billions of dollars, more actions are still needed to improve program effectiveness, according to a recent GAO annual report that specifically identified inefficiencies in federal programs, systems and services in 42 new topic areas.
Since 2011, GAO has reported each year on federal programs with fragmented, overlapping or duplicative goals or actions, and has made hundreds of recommendations about ways to address those problems, reduce costs or boost revenue. Its most recent report cites 112 recommendations from GAO to agencies and Congress to address issues related to 42 new topic areas. Of these, 29 topic areas contain recommendations to reduce fragmentation (i.e., when more than one agency is involved in the same broad area of national need), overlap (i.e., when multiple agencies/programs have similar goals or target similar beneficiaries) and duplication (i.e., when two or more programs are engaged in the same activities or provide the same services to beneficiaries). The other 13 are areas where Congress or federal agencies could take action to reduce the cost of government operations or enhance federal revenue collections.
Congress and agencies have addressed many of the 2,018 recommendations that GAO identified in 13 previous annual reports to reduce costs, increase revenues and improve agencies’ operating effectiveness, although work remains to fully address them. GAO noted that as of March, Congress and agencies had fully addressed 1,341 (about 66%) of these recommendations and partially addressed 139 (about 7%). These efforts have cumulatively resulted in about $667 billion in financial benefits, an increase of $71 billion from GAO’s last report on this topic (see “U.S. Agencies Can Take More Steps To Encourage Financial Benefits,” August 2023).
For example, Congress rescinded certain COVID-19 relief funding that GAO identified as unexpired and unobligated in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which saved the federal government $27.1 billion in federal fiscal year 2023, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.
Agencies and Congress have yet to fully address some 549 recommendations from the previous 13 GAO annual reports. While GAO is no longer tracking 128 of these recommendations “due to changing circumstances,” GAO estimates that fully addressing the remaining 421 open recommendations could result in savings of tens of billions of dollars and improved government services, among other benefits. For example, the departments of Housing and Urban Development and Transportation, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), should each identify and take steps to better manage fragmentation between their respective disaster recovery programs and other federal programs. FEMA should also do so across its own disaster recovery programs, according to GAO.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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