From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Comptroller General Testifies to U.S. House on GAO's
2015 Duplication Report

Description: In his April 14, 2015 testimony to the U.S. House of
Representatives, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro introduces GAO's 2015
Duplication and Cost Savings Report.

Related GAO Work: 

GAO-15-523T: Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: Opportunities to
Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other
Financial Benefits
and 
GAO-15-404SP: 2015 Annual Report: Additional Opportunities to Reduce
Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial
Benefits

Released: April 2015

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Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
House of Representatives

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Duplication, Overlap and Fragmentation
Across the Federal Government

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Comptroller General Gene Dodaro's
Opening Statement
April 14, 2015


[ Mr. Chaffetz ] Okay gentlemen we'll now recognize Mr. Dodaro for 5
minutes.

[ Gene Dodaro: ] Thank you very much Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon to you
ranking member Congressmen Cummings, members of the Committee. I'm very
pleased to be here today to discuss GAOs 2015 report. 

We identified 24 new areas with 66 recommendations. These include a
recommendation to the Congress to create a formal coordinating group to
focus on the oversight of consumer protection issues. There are 20
different agencies involved in this effort at least, there's
fragmentation overlap of responsibilities, and greater efficiencies that
can be achieved as well as better protection to the public. We also have
recommendations for greater coordination among the 42 programs in 6
agencies that provide nonemergency medical transportation. Here, we're
concerned that not enough cooperation has been gained yet from the
Medicaid and VA programs, which are big players and there's not a
cost-sharing agreement in place. The council coordinating this activity
hasn't met since 2008. This is a big issue, particularly with the aging
of our population and the need for these nonemergency medical services
among the ages of the disabled and those without the means to provide
their own transportation for needed healthcare. 

We also identified a component--a provider within the DOD healthcare
system that was set up originally in 1982 that's now being duplicated by
the Tricare Program, which was established in the 1990s and would
recommend that that component can be eliminated thus saving millions of
dollars with the careful transition to ensure that nobody has
interruption in services that are provided. We also recommend
reexamination of the strategic petroleum reserve. With U.S. production
now at record levels and reserves growing both in the strategic
petroleum reserve and in private sector reserves, we now hold much more
than we have to to meet international requirements in the reserve. This
could free up potentially, based on the reexamination, oil that could be
sold to reap billions of dollars that could be used for other government
priorities, and also reduce the operating costs of the strategic
petroleum reserve, which is aging and in need of further repair. 

We also identified areas that were established of 11 hospitals that
provided cancer treatment in the 1980s when most of cancer treatment was
inpatient concern. Now more hospitals can provide it; it's outpatient
concerns and if those hospitals were treated the same way other
hospitals that are treating cancer payments now, and they had a level
playing field the federal government could save $500 million a year in
Medicare spending, healthcare spending. So these are a few of the
examples as it's been mentioned in the past 4 years we've had over 440
recommendations, 37 percent of have been fully implemented, 39 percent
partially, 20 percent not at all. 

The amount of money that's been saved so far has been $20 billion in
implementing our recommendations with another $80 billion in the works
that should be achieved in the coming years. But there's plenty of money
left on the table here in areas that can produce additional billion
dollars in savings and efficiencies. We've grouped them into a number of
categories. It could be more aggressive on strategic sourcing; the
leverage of the government's buying power. Right now OMB is moving on
this as Beth will talk about, but we need to be more aggressive in
setting targets and to achieve the savings that are necessary. 

In February, I was before this committee talking about IT operations and
acquisitions. We put it on our high-risk list across government. Their
consorted efforts could save millions of dollars if not billions of
dollars in waste and inefficiencies in IT operations. We've had many
recommendations to streamline activities at the Defense Department to
reduce overhead to help control their healthcare cost, reduce the cost
of weapon systems. We have recommendations to reform Medicare and
Medicaid payment processes and oversight processes to reduce healthcare
spending, which is much needed at this point in time. We've got
recommendations to also increase tax revenues and to rationalize some
benefit programs where there's some overlapping and duplication in
benefit programs. 

So I appreciate the opportunity to be here today, and discuss these
areas in further detail during the questions and answer period and when
it's appropriate. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.

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