We identified 34 areas where agencies, offices, or initiatives may have similar or overlapping objectives or may provide similar services to the same populations; or where government missions are fragmented across multiple agencies or programs (see table 1). Overlap and fragmentation among government programs or activities can be harbingers of unnecessary duplication. The areas identified below are not intended to represent the full universe of duplication, overlap, or fragmentation within the federal government. Our future work will examine other areas of government for potential duplication, overlap, and fragmentation. As table 1 shows, many of the issues we identified are focused on activities that are contained within single departments or agencies. In those cases, agency officials can generally achieve cost savings or other benefits by implementing existing GAO recommendations or by undertaking new actions suggested in our March 1 report. However, a number of issues we have identified span multiple organizations and therefore may require higher-level attention by the executive branch or enhanced congressional oversight or legislative action. For example: Teacher quality programs: In fiscal year 2009, the federal government spent over $4 billion specifically to improve the quality of our nation’s 3 million teachers through numerous programs across the government. We identified 82 distinct programs designed to help improve teacher quality, either as a primary purpose or as an allowable activity, administered across 10 federal agencies. The proliferation of programs has resulted in fragmentation that can frustrate agency efforts to administer programs in a comprehensive manner, limit the ability to determine which programs are most cost effective, and ultimately increase program costs. In 2009, we recommended that the Secretary of Education work with other agencies as appropriate to develop a coordinated approach for routinely and systematically sharing information that can assist federal programs, states, and local providers in achieving efficient service delivery. The Department of Education has established working groups to help develop more effective collaboration across Education offices, and has reached out to other agencies to develop a framework for sharing information on some teacher quality activities, but it has noted that coordination efforts do not always prove useful and cannot fully eliminate barriers to program alignment, such as programs with differing definitions for similar populations of grantees, which create an impediment to coordination. Congress could help eliminate some barriers through legislation, particularly through the pending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and other key education bills. Specifically, to minimize any wasteful fragmentation and overlap among teacher quality programs, Congress may choose either to eliminate programs that are too small to evaluate cost effectively or to combine programs serving similar target groups into a larger program. Education has already proposed combining 38 programs into 11 programs in its reauthorization proposal, which could allow the agency to dedicate a higher portion of its administrative resources to monitoring programs for results and providing technical assistance. Military health system: The responsibilities and authorities for the Department of Defense’s (DOD) military health system are distributed among several organizations within DOD with no central command authority or single entity accountable for minimizing costs and achieving efficiencies. Under the military health system’s current command structure, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force each has its own headquarters and associated support functions. Annual military health system costs have more than doubled from $19 billion in fiscal year 2001 to $49 billion in 2010 and are expected to increase to over $62 billion by 2015. DOD has made varying levels of progress in implementing limited actions to consolidate certain common administrative, management, and clinical functions. However, to reduce duplication in its command structure and eliminate redundant processes that add to growing defense health care costs, DOD could take action to further assess alternatives for restructuring the governance structure of the military health system. A May 2006 report by the Center for Naval Analyses showed that if DOD and the services had chosen to implement one of the three larger-scale alternative concepts studied by DOD, the department could have achieved significant savings. Our adjustment of those projected savings into 2010 dollars indicates those savings could range from $281 million to $460 million annually depending on the alternative chosen and numbers of military, civilian, and contractor positions eliminated. DOD officials said that they generally agreed with the facts and findings in our analysis. Federal data centers: According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the number of federal data centers grew from 432 in 1998 to more than 2,000 in 2010. These data centers often house similar types of equipment and provide similar processing and storage capabilities, raising concerns about the provision of redundant capabilities, the underutilization of resources, and the significant consumption of energy. While the total annual federal spending associated with data centers has not yet been determined, the Federal Chief Information Officer has found that operating data centers is a significant cost to the federal government, including hardware, software, real estate, and cooling costs. For example, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the electricity cost to operate federal servers and data centers across the government is about $450 million annually. In February 2010, OMB launched the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative to guide federal agencies in developing and implementing data center consolidation plans. As part of this initiative, OMB directed federal agencies to prepare an inventory of their data center assets and a plan for consolidating these assets by August 30, 2010, and to begin implementing them in fiscal year 2011. Moving forward, it will be important for individual agencies to move quickly to correct any missing items in their data center consolidation plans, establish sound baselines so that progress and efficiencies can be measured, begin their consolidation efforts, track their progress, and report to OMB on their progress over time. Sustained monitoring by Congress could help ensure progress is realized. DOD and VA electronic heath record systems: Although DOD and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) have many common health care business needs, the departments have separate efforts to modernize their electronic health record systems. Specifically, DOD has obligated approximately $2 billion over the 13-year life of its Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application and requested $302 million in fiscal 2011 year funds for a new system. For its part, VA reported spending almost $600 million from 2001 to 2007 on eight projects as part of its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture modernization. In April 2008, VA estimated an $11 billion total cost to complete the modernization by 2018. Efforts by the departments to jointly identify and develop common information technology solutions to address their mutual health care needs could result in system development and operation cost savings while supporting higher-quality health care for service members and veterans. We identified several actions that DOD and VA could take to overcome barriers they face in modernizing their electronic health record systems, including revising the departments’ joint strategic plans and defining and implementing a process for identifying and selecting joint information technology investments. Officials from both DOD and VA agreed with these recommendations. Domestic ethanol production: Congress supported domestic ethanol production through a $5.4 billion tax credit program in 2010 and through a renewable fuel standard that applies to transportation fuels used in the United States. The ethanol tax credit and the renewable fuel standard can be duplicative in stimulating domestic production and use of ethanol, and can result in substantial loss of revenue to the Treasury. The ethanol tax credit was recently extended at 45 cents per gallon through December 31, 2011. The tax credit will cost $5.7 billion in forgone revenues in 2011. Because the fuel standard allows increasing annual amounts of conventional biofuels through 2015, which ensures a market for a conventional corn starch ethanol industry that is already mature, Congress may wish to consider whether revisions to the ethanol tax credit are needed, such as reducing, modifying, or phasing out the tax credit. Interagency and agencywide contracts: Agencies have created numerous interagency and agencywide contracts using existing statutes, the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and agency-specific policies. With the proliferation of these contracts, however, there is a risk of unintended duplication and inefficiency. Interagency and agencywide contracting was responsible for at least $54 billion of the approximately $540 billion that was obligated governmentwide for goods and services in fiscal year 2009. However, the federal government does not have a clear, comprehensive view of whether these contracts are being utilized in an efficient and effective manner. In addition, agencies may be unaware of existing contract options that could meet their needs and may be awarding new contracts when use of an existing contract would suffice. Government contracting officials and representatives of vendors have expressed concerns about potential duplication among the interagency and agencywide contracts across government. Some vendors stated they offer similar products and services on multiple contracts and that the effort required to be on multiple contracts results in extra costs to the vendor, which they pass to the government through increased prices. Some vendors stated that the additional cost of being on multiple contracts ranged from $10,000 to $1,000,000 per contract due to increased bid and proposal and administrative costs. Requiring business case analyses for new multiagency and agencywide contracts and ensuring agencies have access to up-to-date and accurate data on the available contracts will promote the efficient use of interagency and agencywide contracting and, by reducing the costs associated with duplicate contracts, help the government better leverage its purchasing power when buying commercial goods and services. OMB reported in August 2010 that it planned to issue overarching guidance that would address the need for agencies to prepare business cases describing the need for a new multiagency or agencywide contract, the value added by its creation, and the agency’s suitability to serve as an executive agent. Additionally, improvements are still needed regarding the accuracy of the federal contracts database in order to determine whether the contracts are being used in an efficient and effective manner. Continued congressional oversight of this issue is warranted. Domestic food assistance: The federal government spent more than $62.5 billion on 18 domestic food and nutrition assistance programs in fiscal year 2008. Programs’ spending ranged from $4 million for the smallest program to more than $37 billion for the largest.