Title: GAO Has Found New Ways to Save the Federal Government Billions of Dollars

Related work: GAO-26-108505, 2026 Annual Report: Opportunities to Reduce Duplication, Overlap, and Fragmentation and Achieve an Additional One Hundred Billion Dollars or More in Future Financial Benefits

Description: Over the years, GAO’s work has helped save taxpayers billions of dollars by reducing duplication, overlap and fragmentation in programs. Each year, we issue a report that highlights this work. On this episode of the Watchdog Report—we’ll talk with Jessica Lucas-Judy about how we do this work and what we found this year. 

Released: May 2026 
  
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[Holly Hobbs:] This is GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for fact-based, nonpartisan news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office—I’m Holly Hobbs. 
 
GAO’s goal is to help improve federal-government operations and save taxpayers’ money. Each year, we issue a report that highlights this work—our annual Duplication, Overlap, and Fragmentation report (sometimes referred to as DOF). 
Over the years, our work has helped to save taxpayers BILLIONS of dollars. How does GAO do this work and what’s new in our latest report? We’ll learn more from GAO’s Jessica Lucas-Judy.Jessica, thanks for joining us. 

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure.

[Holly Hobbs:] So GAO does quite a lot of work on improving government effectiveness and efficiency. And through that we save taxpayers money. What makes DOF different?

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] Well, with most of GAO’s audits we're looking at a specific agency, or a program, or an area. With DOF, with the duplication and cost savings work, we're looking across the whole federal government. It spans all the different audits that GAO does, and our analysts are looking for risks from when fragmentation, overlap or duplication are not effectively managed. When there's ways to make a program or service more efficient, more effective. And some of the risks can result in additional burden for agencies or for the public. They can create confusion about who is supposed to do what, and result in unnecessary costs. And so, we make recommendations that are aimed at improving efficiency and improving effectiveness. We've made more than 2,000 recommendations since we started issuing these reports 16 years ago, and we track those over time and report on progress and on outcomes and results.

[Holly Hobbs:] So I think most of us know what duplication, fragmentation, overlap mean as words, but maybe not in this context. Maybe we can break that out and start with duplication. What does that mean in this context? And maybe even give us an example. 

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] Sure. I think of all the terms this one's the easiest one to understand—the most straightforward. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's where you have two different agencies or different offices that are providing the same service to the same target population. And sometimes, when we're talking about duplicative payments, it's actually to the same individual. We don't find as many examples of this in the work that we do. A lot of what we end up finding are risks of duplication or where the systems or controls that are intended to prevent duplication aren't working as well as they as they should.

Some of the examples are in the Small Business Administration in disaster loan payments. Those are very, very important payments. And it's important to get services and relief to people as quickly as possible. And people are sometimes getting relief also, at the same time, from state or local governments. Sometimes what we found is that the total amount of those payments combined was exceeding a person's actual losses.

And again, it's really important to make sure that people get the relief that they need. But we also want to make sure that there's enough money available across the number of people that are eligible for it. Also in shared services, that's another example. So federal agencies have mission support functions like travel or payroll. And it's possible to try to combine those to reduce overhead and save money. And so we made recommendations to try to improve how agencies are managing those services. 

[Holly Hobbs:] What about overlap, which just sounds like duplication? How is it different? 

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:]  Right. So, there you have agencies that might be providing similar services to similar populations. But there's some degree of overlap that's happening there. So, an example from this year's report is on training for DOD personnel. We found that different services within the Department of Defense were providing overlapping training to cyberspace personnel. And we made recommendations to try to better manage that, to address it, and we think that that could save millions of dollars.

[Holly Hobbs:] And fragmentation?

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] Fragmentation is the one that we find the most often and this is because so many of the problems that the government tries to tackle are really complex. And it requires a lot of different hands, a lot of different agencies to work together. And we look for ways to try to make it more effective, because it needs to be clear who's supposed to do what, when, how? And so food safety is one that's been on our list for a really long time. In fact, it ended up on GAO’s High Risk List. There's 15 different agencies that are involved in the oversight of food safety, and we've made recommendations over the years to try to improve that. Disaster recovery—that's another one where you have 30 different agencies that are involved in providing disaster relief and recovery. We've made recommendations for a consolidated national strategy to try to better manage that and better coordination among those 30 different agencies.

[Holly Hobbs:] How does pointing this out solve a problem? How does it save money?

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] So, we make recommendations that address the problems that we find it, to try to change the circumstances. For example, holding programs or agencies accountable for achieving results. Making sure that there's some kind of monitoring and evaluation towards progress towards goals. Consolidating administrative functions, like the example I mentioned of federal shared services, is another area. Sometimes we'll make recommendations to streamline or even to eliminate if that duplication isn't necessary or it's resulting in bad effects. In other areas is because there might be complexity, you have increased fraud risk. So we'll make recommendations to better manage or better control that fraud and that helps to save money as well.
[Holly Hobbs:] So how much money have we saved through these efforts?

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] Well, I'm pleased to be able to say that, so far, we've identified $774 billion in savings. That's an increase of $49 billion since our report last year. So, as you can see, there's been a lot of progress. And these do end up covering a whole bunch of different areas.

So, for example, in total it's been about $200, $201 billion in the defense area. Another $191 billion in health programs, primarily Medicare and Medicaid, but others as well. We've also made recommendations that have helped to prevent or manage improper payments, including fraudulent COVID relief payments. And that's another area of great savings.

[Holly Hobbs:] How many years have we done this report?

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] This is our 16th.

[Holly Hobbs:] So this is our 16th report. What's new this year?

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] This year we make 97 new recommendations. These include things to improve the performance of the nation's organ transplant system. It's a very important service that's provided to the public. Increasing coordination of employment services for older workers. We also made recommendations for our government-wide strategy for the 13 different federal agencies that are involved in combating scams. Scams cost the public hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And we found that they needed better coordination. There wasn't a shared definition among those agencies of what those scams were, or how to address them. We have a whole section of our report that's about cost savings. And one of them in this year's report is to better manage high-level, radioactive waste. And we think that that could save, potentially, tens of billions of dollars.

[Holly Hobbs:] So we’ve made thousands of recommendations to federal agencies and Congress. What progress has been made?
[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] So far, more than 77% of the recommendations that we made since 2011 have been fully or partially implemented. And these include things like improving support for at risk service members as they're making the transition into civilian life. Also, making improvements in maternal health programs. And then, as I mentioned, a lot of them have financial benefits as well. So, for example, more than $16 billion that was saved through improved oversight and controls of the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program.

[Holly Hobbs:] What does Congress think of this work?

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] Well, we have a number of recommendations in our report that are for Congress specifically. There's about 82 that are still open. And Congress has made some progress in addressing those. For example, they've introduced legislation for 29 of them. But, that legislation hasn't been implemented yet. And a lot of our recommendations to Congress are the ones that have big dollar savings associated with them. Congress is able to use our work as a way of identifying priorities for oversight. Areas that they should be focusing on. Agencies that are, maybe, struggling or having some difficulty. And so we think it's important for Congress to be able to use our work, to conduct oversight and hold federal agencies accountable.
We have another report, actually, that was issued at the same time as the duplication and cost savings report that's just, essentially, a ‘To-Do’ list for Congress. It's all the recommendations that are specific to Congress and talking about the potential benefits that could come from implementing those.

[Holly Hobbs:] You shared a lot of numbers, a lot of ideas. A lot of this is going to sound maybe like ‘inside baseball’ to people outside of the Beltway. What should the public know about this work and why it's important?

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] The problems that the government faces, they're very challenging. They're going to take time and effort to address. And GAO’s role is to help Congress, to help federal agencies make hard choices and put the government on a more sustainable, fiscal path. We want to make sure that investments of taxpayer dollars are achieving the results that they're intended to achieve.

This work has really been instrumental over time in helping focus congressional attention and agency attention to better manage the risks from fragmentation, overlap or duplication and to save significant money. And, in fact, we think that implementing all of GAO’s recommendations could help save another $100 billion or more.

[Holly Hobbs:] Jessica, thanks for your time.

[Jessica Lucas-Judy:] Thank you very much.
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