The federal government faces a series of challenges that in many instances are not possible for any single agency to address alone. Many federal program efforts, including those related to ensuring food safety, providing homeland security, monitoring incidence of infectious diseases, or improving response to natural disasters, transcend more than one agency. Agencies face a range of challenges and barriers when they attempt to work collaboratively. GPRAMA establishes a new framework aimed at taking a more crosscutting and integrated approach to focusing on results and improving government performance. It requires the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in coordination with agencies, to develop—every 4 years—long-term, outcome-oriented goals for a limited number of crosscutting policy areas. On an annual basis, OMB is to provide information on how these long-term crosscutting goals will be achieved. This approach will provide a much needed basis for more fully integrating a wide array of federal activities as well as a cohesive perspective on the long-term goals of the federal government that is focused on priority policy areas. It could also be a valuable tool for governmentwide reexamination of existing programs and proposals for new programs. Our recent report on duplication, overlap, and fragmentation highlights a number of areas where a more crosscutting approach is needed—both across agencies and within a specific agency. Effective GPRAMA implementation could help inform reexamination or restructuring efforts related to these and other areas by identifying the various agencies and federal activities—including spending programs, regulations, and tax expenditures—that contribute to each crosscutting goal. Examples from our work include: Employment and training programs: In fiscal year 2009, 47 federal employment and training programs spent about $18 billion to provide services, such as job search and job counseling, to program participants. Most of these programs are administered by the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services (HHS). We found that 44 of the 47 programs overlap with at least one other program in that they provide at least one similar service to a similar population. Our review of 3 programs among the largest—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Employment Service, and Workforce Investment Act (WIA) Adult programs—found that they provide some of the same services to the same population through separate administrative structures. Although the extent to which individuals receive the same services from these programs is unknown due to limited data, these programs maintain parallel administrative structures to provide some of the same services such as job search assistance to low-income individuals. At the state level, the TANF program (which also provides a wide range of other services) is typically administered by the state human services or welfare agency, while the Employment Service and WIA Adult programs are typically administered by the state workforce agency and provided through one-stop centers. Agency officials acknowledged that greater efficiencies could be achieved in delivering services through these programs but said factors such as the number of clients that any one-stop center can serve and one-stop centers’ proximity to clients, particularly in rural areas, could warrant having multiple entities provide the same services. Colocating services and consolidating administrative structures may increase efficiencies and reduce costs, but implementation can be challenging. Some states have colocated TANF employment and training services in one-stop centers where Employment Service and WIA Adult services are provided. Three states—Florida, Texas, and Utah—have gone a step further by consolidating the agencies that administer these programs, and state officials said this reduced costs and improved services, but they could not provide a dollar figure for cost savings. States and localities may face challenges to colocating services, such as limited office space. In addition, consolidating administrative structures may be time consuming and any cost savings may not be immediately realized. To facilitate further progress by states and localities in increasing administrative efficiencies in employment and training programs, we recommended in 2011 that the Secretaries of Labor and HHS work together to develop and disseminate information that could inform such efforts. As part of this effort, Labor and HHS should examine the incentives for states and localities to undertake such initiatives, and, as warranted, identify options for increasing such incentives. Labor and HHS agreed they should develop and disseminate this information. HHS noted that it lacks legal authority to mandate increased TANF-WIA coordination or create incentives for such efforts. Sustained oversight by Congress could help ensure progress is realized. 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. 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. 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. Although agencies have made progress improving their operations in recent years, they need more effective management capabilities to better implement new programs and policies. As part of the new governmentwide framework created by GPRAMA, OMB is required to develop long-term goals to improve management functions across the government. The act specifies that these goals should include five areas: financial management, human capital management, information technology management, procurement and acquisition management, and real property management. All five of these areas have been identified by GAO as key management challenges across the government. Moreover, some aspects of these areas have warranted our designation as high risk, either governmentwide or at certain agencies—such as strategic human capital management and real property management across the federal government and financial management at DOD. In addition, a number of the cost-savings or revenue-enhancement opportunities we recently identified touch on needed improvements to management functions. Examples include: Noncompetitive contracts: Federal agencies generally are required to award contracts competitively, but a substantial amount of federal money is being obligated on noncompetitive contracts annually. Federal agencies obligated approximately $170 billion on noncompetitive contracts in fiscal year 2009 alone. While there has been some fluctuation over the years, the percentage of obligations under noncompetitive contracts recently has been in the range of 31 percent to over 35 percent. Although some agency decisions to forego competition may be justified, we found that when federal agencies decide to open their contracts to competition, they frequently realize savings. For example, the Department of State (State) awarded a noncompetitive contract for installation and maintenance of technical security equipment at U.S. embassies in 2003.