The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released its 2024 annual report with the promising title of how the government can “reduce fragmentation, overlap, and duplication and achieve billions of dollars in financial benefits.”
Sounds promising. And given the agency's examples, there are millions of dollars in savings just waiting to be claimed at various agencies. Here's a sample:
Congress should consider taking action that could help the Armed Forces Retirement Home address financial shortfalls to reduce the risk of exhausting the trust fund that supports it and potentially generate revenue of one hundred million dollars or more over 10 years.
Federal agencies need building utilization benchmarks to help them identify and reduce underutilized office space, which could save ten million dollars or more over 5 years.
The Department of Defense should reduce the risk of overlapping management activities and potentially save ten million dollars or more over 5 years in medical facility management by continuing its efforts to reevaluate its market structure and establishing performance goals.
Individually, items like these seem like small changes when measured against multi-trillion dollar federal budgets. But these are exactly the sorts of savings and efficiencies the government should adopt. Not only do these savings add up, but the GAO notes that changes the government has made based on its recommendations have saved more than $667.5 billion since 2011.
And not all of its recommendations were enacted, so the potential savings could have been even greater.
Among those is a proposal to save upwards of 141 billion dollars over ten years in Medicare costs:
Congress could realize additional financial benefits if it took steps to direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services to equalize payment rates between settings for evaluation and management office visits and other services that the Secretary deems appropriate.
The bottom line is the GAO plays an essential role in helping the feds be better stewards of taxpayers' money. That role has never been more important than today, given the fiscal incontinence of the political class.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
