February 11, 2026
Chairman James Comer
Ranking Member Robert Garcia
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Chairman Comer, Ranking Member Garcia, and Committee Members,
This week, the Committee will hold a hearing on “Doing More with Less: Deleting Duplicative Programs.” As NTU has written about this issue for a long time, we applaud the Committee’s efforts in this space. We will be watching this hearing closely, and we look forward to working with the Committee to help shed light on good proposals that come from it.
We wanted to note a promising piece of legislation sponsored by Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH), the Duplicative Scoring Act of 2025 (S.2733). This bipartisan bill, initially introduced in 2023, would require the General Accountability Office (GAO) to review every bill that reaches the floor of either the House or Senate to determine if its provisions include the potential creation of a program or office that could be at risk of duplicating the work of an existing federal initiative. While this legislation would not necessarily help consolidate current duplicative programs, it would take a big forward by helping Congress avoid creating new overlapping programs.
Over the last 15 years, GAO has released annual reports to reduce “fragmentation, overlap, and duplication in federal programs.” While these efforts have helped Congress and federal agencies save taxpayers over $700 million, and nearly $60 million in 2024 alone, the vast size of the federal government makes it difficult to find all areas of duplication. Also, when Congress is busy trying to identify and fix policy issues that come up, it can be relatively easy to unintentionally create a project that duplicates something already there. This bill would help stop Congress from creating new overlapping programs, as well as help oversight committees and agencies identify current duplications. This low-cost bill should save taxpayers millions of dollars over time.
While working to stop duplication in the federal government, NTU urges the Committee to consider supporting this legislation. In the absence of a full inventory of federal programs that was required to be in place back in 2010, this would be a great first step to finally limit the wasteful use of taxpayer dollars going forward.
Thank you for holding this important hearing. If you have any questions regarding our comments, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.
Sincerely,
David Timmons
Senior Policy Manager
National Taxpayers Union