GAO 2025 High-Risk List: 38 Federal Programs, 10 Improved, 3 Got Worse

Every two years the Government Accountability Office publishes a short list of the parts of the US government most likely to waste money or fail at their job. The 2025 edition, released on 25 February 2025, has 38 entries. Some have been on it for decades.

It’s the closest thing Washington has to an official map of where things go wrong. Read with the right eye, it’s also a guide to which reforms actually work.

What changed

One area was added: improving the delivery of federal disaster assistance. Three areas were rated for the first time: HHS leadership on public health emergencies, management of the federal prison system and the unemployment insurance system.

Ten improved. Most were at the Defense Department, which saw progress on business transformation, business systems modernisation and contract management. The others were emergency loans for small businesses, the security clearance process, national efforts on drug misuse, the National Flood Insurance Program, the federal role in housing finance, environmental liabilities and the Postal Service’s finances.

Three got worse: DOD weapon systems acquisition, IT acquisitions and management, and the management of federal real property.

Twenty stayed where they were. That group includes some of the biggest: DOD financial management, enforcement of tax laws, cybersecurity of the nation, Medicare and its improper payments, Medicaid integrity and VA health care.

The numbers behind the list

The list matters because the money is large. GAO counts about $2.8 trillion in estimated improper payments since 2003, and more than $150 billion in each of the last seven years. The gross tax gap, the difference between taxes owed and paid on time, was $696 billion for tax year 2022, or $606 billion after late payments and enforcement.

The federal government owns a lot of buildings it can’t afford to maintain. Deferred maintenance on federal property rose from $170 billion in 2017 to $370 billion in 2024. That’s one reason real property regressed.

IT spending is more than $100 billion a year, and the life-cycle cost estimate for the VA’s new electronic health record system is $49.8 billion. The Postal Service lost $16 billion over fiscal years 2023 and 2024 and carries $181 billion in liabilities and debt.

GAO says acting on its high-risk work produced about $84 billion in financial benefits in the two years since 2023, and about $759 billion between fiscal 2006 and 2024. That’s about $40 billion a year.

Why areas come off, and why most don’t

Getting off the list is rare. GAO judges each area on five things: leadership commitment, capacity, an action plan, monitoring and demonstrated progress. Leadership is usually the first to show up and progress the last.

The Defense Department’s improvements on business systems and contracts came after years of the same people pushing the same fixes. The regressions point the other way. Weapons acquisition and IT acquisition both depend on long programmes, where a change of leadership or budget can undo years of work.

IT acquisition has been on the list since 2015. Its slide in 2025 matches what GAO found elsewhere: about 80% of federal IT money goes to running existing systems, and only three of ten critical legacy systems flagged in 2019 had been modernised by early 2025. Government IT failures aren’t a US speciality, but the high-risk list shows how long they stay unfixed.

Who else keeps a list like this

Few governments publish anything quite like it. Britain’s National Audit Office reports on individual projects and its Public Accounts Committee holds hearings, and the government’s own projects authority gives major projects a delivery confidence rating. Neither produces one ranked, recurring list of the whole state’s weak spots. Most European audit courts work the same way, project by project.

The value of GAO’s format is persistence. An area stays on until it’s fixed, so it can’t quietly drop out of view when the headlines move on.

The next update is due around February 2027. It will be the first produced under an acting Comptroller General, Orice Williams Brown, who took over when Gene Dodaro retired at the end of 2025, at a time when GAO’s own budget is under pressure in Congress.