US Government Blew $321 Million on Redundant IT Programs

When you have an information technology budget as large as that of the United States government, monitoring expenditures can be tough. And $82 billion is a beast of an annual budget. So many agencies, so many allocations. How do you ensure that you’re not doubling up or spending on redundant programs? Well, if you’re the federal government, you don’t. You blow hundreds of millions of dollars on duplicative IT programs and then wait for the Government Accountability Office to apprise you of them. To wit, a new GAO study that found 12 redundant IT investments at three key federal agencies — the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services. Between 2008 and 2013, these agencies spent $321 million on programs the GAO determined to be potentially duplicative. Among them: Four overlapping enterprise information security investments at the HHS, and a pair of dueling dental care management programs at the DOD.