Watchdog recommends nearly 100 ways for agencies to save tens of billions

The Government Accountability Office on Tuesday released its annual report highlighting duplicative federal programs and opportunities to promote effectiveness and efficiency across agencies. Officials estimated that implementing their new and past open recommendations could save more than $100 billion. 

Some of the new 97 recommendations for lawmakers and agencies include: 

• Officials should consolidate mission-support services (e.g. payroll and travel) among agencies, which GAO reported could save tens of millions of dollars over three years. Specifically, the watchdog recommended that the Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration improve data collection with respect to the effectiveness of shared services. 
• The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs should identify more opportunities to share healthcare resources, which could reduce fragmentation and also save tens of millions of dollars annually. 
• FBI should lead the creation of a government-wide anti-scam strategy to spur collaboration, as 13 different agencies work to prevent scams. 

Investigators reported that, as of March, agencies had fully or partially addressed 1,662 (77%) of recommendations that GAO has made in these annual reports for the last 16 years, yielding about $774.3 billion in financial benefits. Officials acknowledged, however, that this is a “rough estimate based on a variety of sources that considered different time periods and used different data sources, assumptions and methodologies.”

In the latest report, GAO also flagged past recommendations that remain unimplemented including: 

• Establishing an inventory of federal programs, which includes funding and performance information, to help identify duplication and overlap. The watchdog found in a March report that such an inventory created by OMB is missing statutorily required information.
• Setting up a process to identify and remove ineligible family members from the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, which the watchdog said could save more than $1 billion over nine years. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was enacted in July 2025, included a requirement to fulfill such a recommendation, but the Office of Personnel Management hasn’t implemented it yet.  
• Improving the IRS’ enforcement efforts. Congressional Democrats in 2022 approved nearly $80 billion for the tax agency, in part, to enhance tax collections, but lawmakers since then have rescinded more than two-thirds of that funding. 

The House Republican fiscal 2027 legislative branch appropriations bill would cut GAO’s funding by nearly 25%. Congress in fiscal 2026 held the watchdog’s funding level flat despite an attempt by the House GOP to halve it. The Trump administration has criticized GAO for issuing several findings that officials illegally withheld congressionally approved spending.