Government efficiency and effectiveness, opportunities to address pervasive management risks and challenges while reducing federal costs

" The federal government faces a long-term, unsustainable fiscal path based on an imbalance between federal revenues and spending. To put the government on a more sustainable long-term path, policymakers will need to have a broad fiscal plan that considers reducing spending, increasing revenue, or more likely, a combination of the two. While addressing this structural imbalance will require fiscal policy changes, in the near term, opportunities exist to act in a number of areas to improve this situation. This statement highlights several areas in which the federal government is facing government-wide management challenges and the opportunities to act: improper payments; IT acquisitions, operations, and cybersecurity; and federal real property. This statement draws from GAO's 2017 High-Risk List, the 2017 annual report on fragmentation, overlap, and duplication, and other related work. Properly managing government resources can help address the federal government's fiscal challenges by preventing fraud, waste, and abuse and ensuring funds are put to the best possible use. Although these actions alone cannot put the U.S. government on a sustainable fiscal path, they would improve both the fiscal situation and the federal government's operations"