As part of a goal to trim $1 trillion in deficit spending from the budget, Elon Musk has called for slashing $4 billion in government spending per day. The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could achieve much of these savings—and potentially more—if it addresses problems already identified by existing government watchdogs to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.
Every year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which works for Congress, and executive branch Inspectors General (IGs) issue thousands of government reform recommendations and expose inefficiencies across federal programs. But federal agencies and Congress are often slow to act on this guidance. The GAO reports that 30 percent of the recommendations it made four years ago were ignored. More than 19,000 recommendations made by GAO and IGs remained open as of the end of January.
How much could the federal government save if watchdog recommendations were acted on in a timely manner? Answering this question has become a bipartisan priority in recent years. Last year, the GAO estimated that those potential savings could total between $106 billion and $208 billion. But the congressional watchdog agency also identified 30 additional reforms that lawmakers could enact to save significant sums, including one change to Medicare that would yield a whopping $141 billion.
Even this may be the tip of the iceberg of what DOGE could save by trimming government waste. For example, the GAO has warned that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud. In other words, a concerted effort to crack down on fraud and implement the GAO’s good government reforms could save up to half a trillion dollars, maybe even more.
Of course, making these changes will be easier said than done. Congress could help. It could direct the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to provide annual estimates of the potential budgetary effects of enacting the GAO and Inspector General recommendations. The CBO serves as Congress’s budgetary scorekeeper and routinely estimates the fiscal impact of legislation under consideration. The CBO also is tasked with writing other reports to answer pressing economic and fiscal questions.
I asked former CBO director Keith Hall, now a Mercatus Center fellow, if the office could play a role in estimating the fiscal effects of reducing government waste. “CBO could be asked to produce a report that estimates the budgetary effects of fully implementing the current open set of GAO and IG recommendations,” Hall told me. “Or, perhaps even more interesting, they could be required to produce an annual report on whatever open sets of recommendations exist at the time. This strikes me as helping by offering a useful measure of preventable waste and fraud that would help Congress put pressure on agencies to act. This sort of information can help make agencies more accountable in how they spend taxpayers’ dollars.”
Trimming $4 billion a day from the federal budget may sound like an ambitious goal for the Trump administration and Department of Government Efficiency. But it’s possible that government watchdogs already have plans to save nearly this much or more. Congress should ask the Congressional Budget Office to find out.
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