The latest edition of the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) annual review of Federal spending overlap, duplication, and fragmentation is taking aim at IT project reviews by the largest 24 government agencies and estimating that implementing statutory requirements for those types of reviews could save the government more than $100 million.
The GAO report published today features 148 new measures over 43 topic areas that could yield up to $100 billion of total savings if Congress and agencies take action on those, along with existing recommendations from the watchdog agency.
High on GAO’s list of recommendations in the 2025 report are reviews of Federal IT projects.
“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,” GAO said.
Other tech-related recommendations in this year’s report include GAO’s estimate that the Space Development Agency could save “hundreds of millions of dollars over ten years” if it would “fully demonstrate its space-based laser communications technology in each iterative development phase before progressing.”
GAO also said that the Defense Department could save $100 million or more if it took steps to “incorporate data analytics into its fraud risk management strategy and improve the usability of fraud investigative information to support fraud risk management.”
Further, GAO said OMB and the 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 report also recommends that the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director lead “the coordination of a comprehensive national quantum computing cybersecurity strategy to better manage fragmentation and potential overlap of other agency efforts.” GAO did not attach a potential cost savings figure to that step.