From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: 2017 Duplication and Cost Savings Report Description: Each year, GAO issues a report that identifies duplication, overlap, and fragmentation in federal programs - as well as opportunities for the federal government to save money and increase revenue. So, what's new this year? And which agencies have the most work to do? Related GAO Work: GAO-17-491SP 2017 ANNUAL REPORT: Additional Opportunities to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits Released: April 2017 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's April 2017. The federal government has a big fiscal problem. It's spending more money than it's collecting. Addressing this issue will require a lot of long-term changes to both spending and revenue policy, but Congress and federal agencies could act right now to address federal programs and activities that are fragmented, overlapping, or duplicative, and save billions of dollars in the process. A team co-led by Jessica Lucas-Judy, a director in GAO's Strategic Issues team, recently completed our annual review of these issues. GAO's Sarah Kaczmarek sat down with Jessica to talk about what they found. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] So GAO's been putting out this report since 2011. What kind of progress has been made related to this work? [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] This is our seventh report in a series, as you said, since 2011. During that time, we've identified more than 700 different actions that Congress and Executive Branch agencies can take to reduce or eliminate or better manage duplication, overlap, fragmentation in federal programs or achieve some kind of cost savings or financial benefits or find additional revenues. So far, more than half of the actions that we identified between 2011 and 2016 have been fully addressed. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] What kind of money has been saved by addressing these actions? [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] So far it's been about $136 billion from the actions that have been taken so far. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] So that's a lot of money. One really big lump sum to think about. Can you give me an example of some tangible thing that has saved a lot of money? [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] One example is that Congress allowed a tax credit for ethanol production to expire. This is one that we had identified previously that duplicated other federal efforts to encourage domestic ethanol production. And by allowing that tax credit to expire, it reduced revenue losses by about $29 billion. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] So tell me more about the report this year. What's new? What got added? [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] This year we identified an additional 79 actions in 29 areas. These areas span the whole federal government. So they're in the areas of defense, they include health care, law enforcement, and other topics. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] What's something new that could reduce duplication in the government? [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] One of the things that we identified was the Federal Transit Administration was awarding grants to transit agencies for transit resilience projects. These were in the wake of Hurricane Sandy trying to help mitigate the effects or prevent future effects. And what we found was that there wasn't really a process to be sure that those grants weren't duplicating other efforts. They awarded $3.6 billion in grants and we recommended that FTA go back and look and see where there was duplication. And there might be opportunities to use that money elsewhere or to achieve some cost savings. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] And transportation resilience-so this would be like making sure the systems are still really working well? [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] Right, to help them recover from a natural disaster. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] Okay. And they could have been getting money from other sources. So it was important to make sure where the federal dollars were going, it's going to the place with the most need. [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] It's going to the place with the most need and it's not-I mean we understand that there are opportunities. There are places where you want to have duplication, where duplication is beneficial. In all of the areas that we identified throughout all of our reports, we're trying to target and pinpoint the unnecessary duplication where the duplication's not achieving any additional benefit. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] So along those lines, what's slated to be done? [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] We still have a total of 395 actions that are open and if those were fully addressed, the government could save potentially tens of billions of dollars more. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] Do some agencies have more work to do here than others? [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] Our report highlights a number of different agencies, seven in particular, that have more than 22 actions each that we've identified that they could address. And these include Defense, Health and Human Services, IRS, Homeland Security, and other agencies. Certainly the bigger agencies are the ones that you would expect to have more actions, more opportunities that they could fix or better target, better manage duplication, overlap, and fragmentation. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] Finally for taxpayers, what do you see as the bottom line of this report? [ Jessica Lucas-Judy: ] Bottom line, the federal government's on a long-term unsustainable fiscal path. And as policymakers are facing difficult choices, GAO's report provides almost 400 different opportunities to make the government more efficient and more effective. [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit gao.gov, and be sure to tune in to the next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report, for more from the congressional watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.