The Government Accountability Office’s 2026 Annual Report identifies 97 new matters for congressional consideration aimed at reducing duplication, overlap, and fragmentation across federal agencies — inefficiencies the GAO estimates could yield $100 billion or more in future financial benefits if addressed. The report flags systemic risks that emerge when redundant programs go unmanaged, including inconsistent data on program effectiveness, resource waste, barriers to public access, and heightened exposure to fraud, waste, and abuse. These findings reinforce a pattern the GAO has documented for years: sprawling federal bureaucracies often spend in parallel rather than in coordination, with taxpayers absorbing the cost.
Among the highlighted examples is a notable failure of coordination between the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, two of the largest and most expensive agencies in the federal government. The GAO found that existing health care resource-sharing agreements between VA and DOD have not been adequately evaluated, leaving significant opportunities for consolidation on the table — opportunities that could improve care access for veterans and service members while saving tens of millions of dollars. The persistence of this kind of inter-agency fragmentation, particularly between defense and veterans’ health systems, is precisely the institutionalized inefficiency that critics of military spending — and works like War Is Still A Racket — have long argued serves bureaucratic interests over public ones.