Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the new Department of Government Efficiency have set an ambitious goal of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. Musk recently acknowledged that even $1 trillion in savings would be an “epic outcome.” But how will they do it? And how can Congress help?
One promising path to achieving trillions in potential savings involves stopping waste, fraud, and abuse in federal programs. For example, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has trimmed more than $660 billion from the federal government since 2011 by issuing annual reports identifying duplicative federal programs.
But these savings are based on changes that Congress or federal agencies made to improve efficiency in response to GAO’s recommendations. Every year, the legislative and executive branches ignore recommendations made by government watchdogs that could yield substantial savings.
In 2022, Congress enacted the Improving Government for America’s Taxpayers Act and approved report language accompanying the annual spending bill requiring new information from GAO to estimate how much taxpayers could save if GAO’s unimplemented recommendations were made. In 2024, GAO told Congress that implementing 5,400 open government reform recommendations would yield between $106 billion and $208 billion in financial benefits. The watchdog agency also identified a dozen changes that Congress could make that would each result in more than $1 billion in savings, including a reform to Medicare payment systems that could save $141 billion.
That means that DOGE and the new administration could save hundreds of billions of dollars in 2025 simply by taking the advice of auditors who have spent years identifying government inefficiencies on behalf of Congress.
But GAO’s 5,400 open recommendations account for only about a quarter of the open recommendations put forth by government watchdogs. The federal agency inspectors general report another 13,600 open recommendations across federal agencies. Like GAO, the IGs are focused on stopping waste, fraud, and abuse in federal programs and issuing recommendations to improve government efficiency and performance.
In 1988, Congress updated the Inspector General Act to provide uniform guidance for how IGs estimate and report their monetary impact, including by tallying questioned costs and identified funds that could be put to better use. (The Council on Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) publishes a 36-page toolkit on the topic.) Each IG publishes estimates of its return on investment based on these metrics.
In FY2023, CIGIE’s annual report summarizing the impact of the IG community tallied $93 billion in potential savings, including $82 billion from audits recommendation and nearly $11 billion from investigative work. But this information isn’t published in a way that is easy for Congress or the White House to apply in order to improve efficiency and achieve savings.
In their semiannual reports to Congress, some IGs publish cost estimates of unimplemented recommendations that have the potential to achieve cost savings. For example, the Treasury Office of Inspector General reports “105 open and unimplemented recommendations” issued prior to April 2024 with “over $2.2 billion in potential cost savings.” The Social Security IG tallied 187 open recommendations that could save an estimated $6.7 billion. But other IGs don’t publish clear estimates of potential savings associated with unimplemented recommendations.
With a new administration focused on achieving trillions in savings through efficiency reforms, it’s a missed opportunity that the Inspector General community does not report this information in a way that would allow Congress, DOGE, or the Office of Management and Budget to quickly identify and implement all the open IG recommendations that could yield substantial savings.
Congress has already required GAO to provide annual estimates of what implementing open recommendations could save. Now, lawmakers should establish similar reporting recommendations for the Inspectors General. An organized “to-do list” of open recommendations for agency heads or Congress from the IG community would provide another roadmap of good-government reforms that could be followed to achieve tens, if not hundreds, of billions in potential cost savings.
