Taxpayer group's letter for S. 2733 puts GAO duplication savings at $700 million; GAO reports $774.3 billion

The National Taxpayers Union has put its name behind S. 2733, the Duplication Scoring Act of 2025, and the case it makes rests on a savings figure. Fifteen years of Government Accountability Office reporting on overlapping federal programs, the group's letter states, have helped Congress and federal agencies "save taxpayers over $700 million, and nearly $60 million in 2024 alone." GAO's own published accounting of that work reports approximately $774.3 billion.

The letter is signed David Timmons, Senior Policy Manager, National Taxpayers Union, and it is a short piece of advocacy rather than a study. It names Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) as sponsors, calls the measure bipartisan and initially introduced in 2023, and points to a hearing the committee would hold that week on deleting duplicative programs. The captured page names neither the committee holding that hearing nor an addressee. The argument is deliberately modest: the bill would not necessarily consolidate programs that already overlap, but it would help Congress stop adding new ones, and it would cost little. The letter also renders the agency as the General Accountability Office and the bill as the Duplicative Scoring Act of 2025; the short title in the bill text is the Duplication Scoring Act of 2025.

What S. 2733 would do sits in the scoring machinery. The text as introduced defines its trigger as "a bill or joint resolution of a public character reported by any committee of Congress (including the Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on the Budget of either House)". The captured text also carries the phrases "a new duplicative or overlapping feature" and "as a supplement to the estimate"; the capture does not show who makes such a finding or which estimate it supplements.

The record half is GAO's, and it is not obscure. The agency's duplication and cost savings page states: "These efforts have resulted in approximately $774.3 billion in financial benefits, an increase of approximately $49.3 billion since our 2025 report." The 2026 annual report, GAO-26-108505, carries the same total and shows how it is assembled. Since 2011 the agency has issued 145 matters for Congress and 2,003 recommendations for federal agencies. As of March 2026, 1,662 of those 2,148 items, or 77 percent, had been fully or partially addressed. GAO separately reports 610 open matters and recommendations, of which "182 (about 30 percent) have the potential for financial benefits." The dollar total is attributed to actions Congress and agencies actually took, and the report keeps it apart from what it estimates is still on the table.

That forecast half is stated as a forecast. The 2026 report puts the value of fully addressing the remaining open items at one hundred billion dollars or more, and a GAO press release on the same report says implementing open recommendations could yield "between $132 billion and $251 billion in future savings." The 2026 cycle added 97 new matters and recommendations. The examples are specific rather than abstract: the VA and DOD evaluating shared health care agreements, which GAO says could potentially save tens of millions of dollars annually, and the Energy Department managing certain waste as non-high-level radioactive waste, which it says could potentially save tens of billions.

Set the two documents side by side and the letter is short by three orders of magnitude. GAO's $774.3 billion is roughly 1,000 times the letter's cumulative total of a little over $700 million. The single-period comparison is looser, because the two figures are not measured over the same window: the letter's nearly $60 million is stated for 2024 on a basis the letter does not specify, while GAO's $49.3 billion is the increase between its 2025 and 2026 annual reports. Even allowing for that mismatch, the gap is on the order of 800 to one, and it runs the same direction. The smaller number is not doing some different job in the letter. It is offered as the reason to take GAO's duplication work seriously enough to give it a place in cost estimates.

The second drift in the letter is about reach, and it does not depend on arithmetic. The letter describes the bill as requiring GAO to "review every bill that reaches the floor of either the House or Senate". The bill's own definition stops earlier: a covered measure is one reported by a committee. Measures placed directly on a chamber's calendar, or moved without a committee report, would sit outside the screen entirely. For a bill sold as the way to catch duplication before it becomes law, that is the material limit, and it is in the text the letter asks Congress to pass.

The correct figure was not hard to find. Citizens Against Government Waste, writing on the same GAO report, reproduced it: "by fully or partially addressing 1,662, or 77 percent of the 2,148 of its recommendations from 2011 to 2026, Congress and federal agencies have saved taxpayers $774.3 billion." Two groups in the same advocacy lane wrote about the same body of GAO duplication work; one carried the number GAO published.

As analysis rather than reporting: the error cuts against the letter's own case. If GAO's duplication work has returned $774.3 billion since 2011, and 182 open items still carry potential financial benefits, then the argument for wiring GAO's findings into cost estimates is stronger than the letter makes it, not weaker. None of this decides whether the bill is worth passing. It establishes that the strongest number available to the bill's supporters was misstated by a supporter, and that the description of what the bill covers was wider than the text.

Three things resolve this on a date. GAO's next annual duplication report is the first: on the agency's own trend, $49.3 billion added between the 2025 and 2026 editions, the 2027 report should carry a cumulative financial benefits figure above $774.3 billion, and that is checkable by June 30, 2027. A Congressional Budget Office cost estimate for the bill, which this desk could not capture, would settle the bill's own cost whenever one can be read. The letter is the third: NTU can correct $700 million to $774.3 billion and the floor to committee, or leave both standing where a reader can compare them. No response from the National Taxpayers Union is on file for this piece; a reply is marked required in its ledger, and a documented request to the group goes with it before publication.