GAO on CrossGov.com

GAO Finds New Impoundment Violations as the House Proposes a 25% Cut to Congress's Watchdog

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 7 October 2026 the Government Accountability Office issued two more decisions finding that the executive branch broke the Impoundment Control Act. One concerned the EPA’s Community Change Grants. The other found that HHS’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality withheld more than $78 million that Congress had appropriated.

They join a long list. In 2025 GAO found violations involving electric-vehicle charging money under the NEVI programme, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Head Start, the National Institutes of Health, FEMA and, in part, a DOE school-energy programme. By April 2025 it had 39 impoundment investigations open.

After USAID: GAO Counts 6,780 Awards Ended as the State Department Takes Over $52 Billion in Foreign Aid

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 30 September 2026 GAO published its accounting of what happened to the US Agency for International Development. Between January 2025 and March 2026, USAID ended about 6,780 of its 7,510 awards, on which $79.1 billion had been obligated. About $52.1 billion in active awards remains, now managed by the State Department. USAID’s staff fell from about 13,600 to 241 by April 2026.

GAO also found that State had no documented guidance for deciding which awards to end. It made three recommendations, which State accepted.

FEMA Denies More State Disaster Requests With 21,000 Staff and a Surge Force of 240, as States Absorb the Cost

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 8 October FEMA turned down Illinois’s request for federal help with damage from storms in August, across eight counties. Administrator Cameron Hamilton said aid was “not warranted.” The state is appealing, and Darin LaHood, a Republican congressman from the area, objected.

It’s the latest in a run of denials that has shifted disaster costs to states. In July FEMA denied requests from New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island for a winter blizzard, together worth about $227 million. All four have appealed.

Bid Protests at GAO Fall to a Decade Low With a 14% Sustain Rate, Yet the Pentagon and GSA Push 'Loser Pays'

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Companies filed 1,688 cases at GAO in fiscal 2025 challenging federal contract awards, according to GAO’s annual report to Congress. That’s 6% fewer than the year before and among the lowest counts in a decade. GAO decided 380 on the merits and sustained 53, a sustain rate of 14%, down from 16%.

The more telling number is the effectiveness rate: in 52% of cases the protester got some relief, either because GAO sustained the protest or because the agency fixed the problem itself before a decision.

GAO Flags FAR Overhaul Clause Confusion as the Second Batch of Rewrites Hits an October 19 Comment Deadline

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 6 October GAO released its decision on protests against the Army’s MAPS contract, a $50 billion vehicle for professional and IT services. It upheld the Army. But it said the solicitation’s mix of old Federal Acquisition Regulation clauses and new ones from the administration’s FAR overhaul could leave bidders unable to tell which version applied, and called it “not a model of clarity.”

That’s the problem contractors have described all year. Since the overhaul began, they’ve had to bid against three texts at once: the old FAR, the agency deviations that put the new text into effect early, and the formal proposed rules.

Improper Payments: $186 Billion a Year, a GAO Fraud Estimate Up to $521 Billion, and Treasury's Do Not Pay Push

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Federal agencies reported $186 billion in improper payments for fiscal 2025. About $153 billion of that was overpayments. The rest is mostly payments that agencies can’t show were correct, because the paperwork is missing.

Since 2003, the cumulative total is about $2.8 trillion, according to GAO. Most of it comes from a handful of large programmes.

Where the money goes

Medicare is the biggest source, at about $57 billion across its parts. Medicaid reported $37.39 billion. In Medicaid, about 77% of improper payments come from insufficient documentation, often eligibility files that states couldn’t produce, so the figure overstates outright waste.

Pocket Rescissions Explained: How a 1974 Law Against Nixon's Impoundments Became the 2025-26 Budget Fight

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 25 September 2026, five days before the fiscal year ended, the White House sent Congress a special message proposing to cancel $810 million across 11 accounts in seven departments. The biggest item was $567 million for refugee and entrant assistance at HHS. The House had already said it would be out until November.

That timing is the whole point of a pocket rescission. Under the 1974 law that governs it, the President can hold back money he has proposed to cancel for 45 days while Congress considers it. If the money expires before the 45 days are up, it’s gone, whatever Congress does. On 29 September GAO ruled that the President may not force the expiry of money Congress enacted and didn’t rescind. The money appears to have expired on 30 September anyway.

DOGE Ends as GAO Calls Its $110 Billion Savings Claim Unreliable and the Federal Workforce Shrinks 11%

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Department of Government Efficiency formally ended on 4 July 2026, the date written into the executive order that created it. There was no closing report. OMB Director Russell Vought said there wouldn’t be one. In practice DOGE had stopped existing months earlier. In November 2025, Reuters quoted OPM Director Scott Kupor saying of it, “That doesn’t exist.” Its functions had been folded into OPM.

What DOGE leaves behind is two sets of numbers: the savings it claimed and the people who left government. GAO has now checked both.

Why Government IT Projects Fail: HealthCare.gov, the FBI's Virtual Case File and the Lessons From Phoenix, Horizon and Robodebt

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 1 October 2013 HealthCare.gov opened and buckled on day one. The HHS inspector general later counted nearly $800 million obligated across 60 contracts by February 2014. A decade earlier the FBI had scrapped its Virtual Case File after three years and $170 million. And GAO says the federal government still spends about 80% of its more than $100 billion a year in IT on running systems it already has.

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

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Hegseth's Acquisition Overhaul Meets GAO's Numbers: 12-Year Weapons Timelines, a Cancelled Frigate and a Late Columbia Submarine

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

GAO’s annual assessment of major weapons programmes, published on 2 July 2026, covered 104 programmes with planned spending of more than $2.4 trillion. It found the average time to field a new capability is now over 12 years, and rising. Of 40 programmes started on the Pentagon’s fast “middle tier” path since 2018, 18 began with immature technology.

That’s the baseline against which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s acquisition overhaul, launched in November 2025, will be judged.

Technology Modernization Fund Faces the December 11 Cliff After GAO Finds $13.5 Million in Realised Savings on $1 Billion

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Technology Modernization Fund was created in 2017 to lend agencies money to replace old IT systems, with the loans repaid from savings. GAO reported in July that the fund had invested about $1.03 billion in 68 projects by June 2025. The projects expected about $1.06 billion in savings, but 98% of that isn’t expected until fiscal 2027 or later. Realised savings so far: about $13.5 million, from 11 projects. Thirty-seven projects expect no savings at all, and seven were cancelled.

VA's Oracle Health Record Costs Near $50 Billion as the Contract Ceiling Nearly Triples and Cleveland and Anchorage Go Next

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing on 2 September, VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence put the cost of the department’s new electronic health record at about $48 billion: about $37 billion to finish deploying it through 2031 and about $11 billion to run it. He confirmed the figure isn’t an independent estimate.

The last independent estimate, by the Institute for Defense Analyses in 2022, was $49.8 billion over the system’s life. GAO testified the same day that the estimate needs updating and that VA still hasn’t provided a new cost estimate or a schedule GAO can assess.

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

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

GAO Finds 11 Federal Legacy IT Systems Costing $754 Million a Year, the Oldest 60 Years Old

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

GAO’s latest review of federal legacy IT looked at 11 critical systems across ten agencies. Together they cost about $754 million a year to run. They range from 23 to 60 years old. The Defense Department’s oldest system is 60. A Treasury system, written in COBOL and assembly language, is 59.

Eight of the eleven still run on legacy languages. Several depend on hardware the vendor no longer supports, and on a shrinking pool of staff who know how they work.