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Duplication & Cost Savings GAO’s annual report on the federal government’s opportunities to reduce fragmentation, overlap, and duplication, as well as reduce costs and increase revenue.

On May 13, 2025, GAO released its 15th annual report highlighting opportunities to reduce fragmentation, overlap, and duplication in federal programs—as well as chances to save money and increase revenue.

We identified 148 new matters for congressional consideration and recommendations for agencies to save money and improve efficiency and effectiveness of government programs and activities.

Notable examples include:

• The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and 24 federal agencies should implement statutory requirements for annual IT portfolio reviews and high-risk IT investment reviews, which could result in one hundred million dollars or more in cost savings by reducing duplicative IT investments and halting or terminating investments, when appropriate.

• The Space Development Agency should fully demonstrate its space-based laser communications technology in each iterative development phase before progressing, potentially saving hundreds of millions of dollars over 10 years.

• The Department of Defense should take steps to incorporate data analytics into its fraud risk management strategy and improve the usability of fraud investigative information to support fraud risk management and potentially save one hundred million dollars or more.

• OMB and General Services Administration should join Congress in taking steps to help ensure the Federal Audit Clearinghouse contains quality single audit information, which could reduce risk and resolve deficiencies in federal award spending by hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

• The Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts should better manage fragmentation by collaborating with relevant stakeholders when updating design standards for constructing federal courthouses, and reassess changes made to those standards to potentially avoid cost increases of tens of millions of dollars.

• Congress should clarify the Department of Energy’s waste management authority at the Hanford site. Energy should also pause work at a waste treatment facility at the site—as it previously did with other types of waste—until it takes several actions, potentially saving billions of dollars.

• The Department of Interior could prevent continued productivity losses and cost overruns from a failed data system development and improve its compliance activities to verify federal oil and gas royalties, potentially increasing collections by tens of millions of dollars per year.

Congress and agencies have made significant progress in addressing many of the 2,049 matters and recommendations that we identified from 2011 to 2025. These efforts have resulted in approximately $725 billion in financial benefits, an increase of approximately $57 billion since our 2024 report.

View the 2025 Report

Read our press release about the 2025 annual report—issued on May 13, 2025—to find out more.