In our four annual reports issued from 2011 through 2014, we identified over 180 areas with approximately 440 actions that the executive branch and Congress could take to address fragmentation, overlap, and duplication; achieve other cost savings; or enhance revenue. Figure 1 outlines the definitions we use for fragmentation, overlap, and duplication. Although it may be appropriate for multiple agencies or entities to be involved in the same programmatic or policy area due to the nature or magnitude of the federal effort, the instances of fragmentation, overlap, or duplication that we include in our annual reports are in areas where multiple programs and activities may be creating inefficiencies. We consider programs or activities to be fragmented when more than one federal agency (or more than one organization within an agency) is involved in the same broad area of national need, which may result in inefficiencies in how the government delivers services. We have identified fragmentation in multiple programs we reviewed. For example, in our 2014 annual report, we reported that the Department of Defense (DOD) does not have a consolidated agency-wide strategy to contract for health care professionals, resulting in a contracting approach that is largely fragmented. Although some of the military departments attempted to consolidate their health care staffing requirements through joint-use contracts, such contracts only accounted for approximately 8 percent of the $1.14 billion in obligations for health care professionals in fiscal year 2011. Moreover, in May 2013 we identified several instances in which a single military department awarded numerous task orders for the same type of health care professional in the same area or facility. For example, we identified 24 separate task orders for contracted medical assistants at the same military treatment facility. By not consolidating its requirements, this facility missed the opportunity to achieve potential cost savings and other efficiencies. Fragmentation also can be a harbinger of overlap or duplication. Overlap occurs when multiple agencies or programs have similar goals, engage in similar activities or strategies to achieve them, or target similar beneficiaries. We found overlap among federal programs or initiatives in a variety of areas, including housing assistance. In particular, in our 2012 annual report, we reported that 20 different entities administered 160 programs, tax expenditures, and other tools that supported homeownership and rental housing in fiscal year 2010. In addition, we identified 39 programs, tax expenditures, and other tools that provided assistance for buying, selling, or financing a home and 8 programs and tax expenditures that provide assistance to rental property owners. We found overlap in products offered and markets served by the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Rural Housing Service and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Federal Housing Administration, among others. In August 2012, we questioned the need for maintaining separate programs for rural areas. In other areas, we found evidence of duplication, which occurs when two or more agencies or programs engage in the same activities or provide the same services to the same beneficiaries. For example, we reported in 2013 that a total of 31 federal departments and agencies invested billions of dollars to collect, maintain, and use geospatial information— information linked to specific geographic locations that supports many government functions, such as maintaining roads and responding to natural disasters. We found that federal agencies had not effectively implemented policies and procedures that would help them identify and coordinate geospatial data acquisitions across the government. As a result, we found that agencies made duplicative investments and risk missing opportunities to jointly acquire data and save millions of dollars. In addition, opportunities exist to reduce the cost of government operations or enhance revenue collections. For example, our body of work has raised questions about whether DOD’s efforts to reduce headquarters overhead will result in meaningful savings. In 2013, the Secretary of Defense directed a 20 percent cut in management headquarters spending throughout DOD, to include the combatant commands and service component commands. However, our work found that mission and headquarters-support costs for the five geographic combatant commands and their service component commands we reviewed more than doubled from fiscal years 2007 through 2012, to about $1.7 billion. We recommended that DOD more systematically evaluate the sizing and resourcing of its combatant commands. If the department applied the 20 percent reduction in management headquarters spending to the $1.7 billion DOD used to operate and support the five geographic combatant commands in fiscal year 2012, we reported that DOD could achieve up to an estimated $340 million in annual savings. In our 2013 report, we reported that refining return-on-investment measures could improve how the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allocates enforcement resources (subject to other considerations, such as minimizing compliance costs and ensuring equitable treatment of taxpayers). Our work illustrated that a small shift in existing resources— from examinations of less productive groups of tax returns to more productive groups—could potentially increase enforcement revenue by more than $1 billion. In addition, in our 2011 annual report, we identified opportunities for improving the Department of the Interior’s management of federal oil and gas resources. In particular, increasing the diligent development of federal lands and waters leased for oil and gas exploration and production and considering adjustments to Interior’s royalty rates to a level that would ensure the government a fair return, among other actions, could result in approximately $2 billion in revenues over 10 years. We found that the executive branch agencies and Congress have made progress in addressing the actions identified in our 2011–2014 annual reports. As shown in table 1, of the approximately 440 actions needed in these areas, 135 (29 percent) were addressed, 202 (44 percent) were partially addressed, and 103 (22 percent) were not addressed as of November 2014. Examples of progress made include DOD and Congressional actions to reduce DOD’s fragmented approach for acquiring combat uniforms. In 2013, we found that DOD’s fragmented approach could lead to increased risk on the battlefield for military personnel and increased development and acquisition costs. In response, DOD developed and issued guidance on joint criteria that will help to ensure that future service-specific uniforms will provide equivalent levels of performance and protection. In addition, a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 established as policy that the Secretary of Defense shall eliminate the development and fielding of service-specific combat and camouflage utility uniforms in order to adopt and field common uniforms for specific environments to be used by all members of the armed forces.Subsequently, the Army chose not to introduce a new family of camouflage uniforms into its inventory, in part, because of this legislation, resulting in a cost avoidance of about $4.2 billion over 5 years. In addition, progress has been made in addressing the proliferation of certain programs. For example, the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) implemented our suggested actions to better manage overlap across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs. Specifically, NSTC released guidance to agencies on how to align their programs and budget submissions with the goals of NSTC’s 5-Year strategic plan for STEM education and on developing evaluations for the programs. In addition, several programs were eliminated or consolidated into new programs, with the total number of STEM education programs dropping from 209 funded in fiscal year 2010 to 158 funded in 2012. The President’s fiscal year 2016 budget proposes to further consolidate and eliminate 20 STEM programs across eight agencies. These efforts help agencies better target resources toward programs with positive outcomes and achieve the greatest impact in developing a pipeline of future workers in STEM fields. As another example, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, enacted in July 2014, includes provisions to strengthen the workforce development system under which a variety of employment and training services are provided to program participants. In particular, the law requires that states develop a unified state plan that covers all designated core programs to receive certain funding. States’ implementation of the requirement may enable them to increase administrative efficiencies in employment and training programs—a key objective of our prior recommendations on employment and training programs. We estimated that executive branch and congressional efforts to address suggested actions resulted in roughly $20 billion in financial benefits from fiscal years 2011 through 2014, with another approximately $80 billion in additional benefits projected to be accrued through 2023. For example, in our 2011 annual report, we stated that the ethanol tax credit would cost about $5 billion in forgone revenues in 2011 and that Congress could reduce annual revenue losses by addressing duplicative federal efforts directed at increasing domestic ethanol production. To reduce these revenue losses, we suggested that Congress consider whether revisions to the ethanol tax credit were needed and suggested options to consider, including allowing the credit for the volumetric ethanol excise tax (for fuel blenders that purchase and blend ethanol with gasoline) to expire at the end of 2011. Congress allowed the tax credit to expire at the end of 2011. In our 2012 annual report, we presented options for adjusting the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) passenger security fee—a uniform fee on passengers of U.S. and foreign air carriers originating at airports in the United States—to offset billions of dollars in civil aviation security costs. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 modifies the passenger security fee from its current per enplanement structure ($2.50 per enplanement with a maximum one-way-trip fee of $5.00) to a structure that increases the passenger security fee to a flat $5.60 per one-way-trip, effective July 1, 2014. Specifically, this legislation identifies $12.6 billion in fee collections that, over a 10-year period beginning in fiscal year 2014 and continuing through fiscal year 2023, will contribute to deficit reduction. Fees collected beyond those identified for deficit reduction are available, consistent with existing law, to offset TSA’s aviation security costs. This fee is expected to cover 43 percent of aviation security costs beginning in fiscal year 2014, compared with the approximately 30 percent offset under the previous fee structure. Table 2 outlines a number of addressed actions that resulted in or are expected to result in cost savings or enhanced revenue.