oversight

GAO 2026 Duplication Report: $774 Billion Saved Since 2011, $100 Billion Still on the Table, and $186 Billion in Improper Payments

Since 2011 GAO has published an annual report on duplication, overlap and fragmentation in the federal government: programmes that do the same thing, agencies that trip over each other, and money that could be saved by fixing it. The sixteenth edition came out on 12 May 2026.

The headline number is big. GAO estimates that acting on its past recommendations has produced about $774.3 billion in financial benefits since 2011, up about $49.3 billion since the previous report. GAO calls these rough estimates.

The more useful numbers are the ones still open.

What hasn’t been done

GAO has made 2,148 recommendations to agencies and matters for Congress through this series. By March 2026, 1,662 of them, about 77%, had been fully or partly addressed. In all, 610 items are still open, including 97 new ones this year. About 182 of the open items have financial benefits attached, which GAO values at $100 billion or more.

The harder part is Congress. GAO’s open “matters for Congress”, the ones only legislation can fix, numbered 82 at the last count. Lawmakers introduced bills on 30 of them in the last two Congresses. As of February 2026, none had been enacted.

Some of the open items are large:

  • Paying the same Medicare rate for the same service regardless of where it’s delivered, so-called site-neutral payments, worth an estimated $156.9 billion over ten years by CBO’s count.
  • Changes to Medicare Part B drug payments under the 340B programme, worth tens of billions.
  • FirstNet, the public-safety broadband network, worth $15 billion over 15 years. Its authority sunsets in 2027.
  • Rules on individual retirement accounts, worth $10 billion or more.

What’s new this year

The 2026 report adds smaller but telling cases. The VA and Defense Department still don’t share health care resources as well as they could, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars a year. Federal efforts against scams are split across agencies, and GAO wants a government-wide strategy led by the FBI. Education and Labor both run programmes for older workers. And the Energy Department’s rules for classifying nuclear waste could save tens of billions if changed.

The improper payments problem

A separate GAO report in April 2026 put federal improper payments for fiscal 2025 at about $186 billion, across 64 programmes at 15 agencies. That’s up about $24 billion from fiscal 2024, mostly because more programmes reported estimates for the first time. The total since 2003 is about $3 trillion.

Improper doesn’t always mean fraud. It includes payments made without the right documentation, to the wrong person or in the wrong amount. Medicare and Medicaid account for the largest shares, followed by the earned income tax credit and food assistance.

Why the gap persists

The duplication report has an unusual feature: it keeps score. Each year it shows how many past findings were acted on, and the 77% rate is respectable. But the remaining items are the hard ones. They usually need Congress to take money or jurisdiction away from someone, which is exactly what committees are built to resist.

Other countries’ audit offices face the same problem. Britain’s National Audit Office estimates savings and reports to Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, which can press but not legislate. The difference in Washington is scale, and the fact that the list of unfinished items is public, priced and updated every year.

That’s also why the series matters as GAO’s high-risk list does. Neither saves money on its own. Both make it harder to pretend the savings aren’t there.