This week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) – an official government watchdog – released its second-annual report on duplication, overlap, and fragmentation in federal programs. This year’s report finds 51 areas in the federal budget where cost savings can be achieved by merely adopting commonsense measures to run government more efficiently and sensibly.

Examples that they highlight include:

• Eleven agencies implement 94 different federal government programs to encourage “green building” practices in state and local governments and the private sector. GAO points out that only about a third of these programs actually have clear goals and performance evaluations, so that “the results of most initiatives and their related investments in green building are unknown.”

• Twenty federal entities administer 160 different programs, tax expenditures, and other initiatives to promote homeownership and affordable housing, costing taxpayers over $170 billion in the year 2010 alone. And GAO shows that some of these programs run at counter-purposes to one another. For example, one tax credit encourages owners to preserve the “historic character” of old buildings, but that undermines another tax credit that incentivizes the use of new energy-efficient building technologies.

• The federal government spent $30.7 million in 2010 on at least 15 different “financial literacy” programs administered by 13 different agencies. GAO notes that such “fragmentation increases the risk of inefficiency and redundancy and highlights the need for strong coordination, or potential consolidation, of these efforts.”

• In 2010, 83 percent of the 209 different programs to encourage educational opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) overlapped with at least one other program. As GAO writes: “Over the decades, Congress and the executive branch have continued to create new STEM education programs, even though there is a general lack of assessment of how well the programs are working.”

Sadly, these examples and many more all come on top of the 81 examples of waste and duplication that GAO identified in last year’s report. In a supplemental document, GAO discloses the troubling fact that only 4 of those 81 clear cases of government waste had been satisfactorily addressed over the last year.

In other words, while the President continues to grandstand about the importance of a “balanced approach to deficit reduction” (which is his code for tax hikes), he passes up even these easy opportunities to cut spending and streamline government. Congress is no less blameless: neither the House nor the Senate passed legislation last year that would specifically address the waste that the GAO identified.

In the meantime, of course, spending continues to grow in Washington. The federal budget grew by $150 billion in 2011, climbing to a whopping $3.6 trillion overall. At a time when our federal government is mired in over $15 trillion in debt, at least this "low hanging fruit" of waste and duplication should be addressed immediately to cut costs and save taxpayer money.

Yet even this would be just a small step in the right direction: to truly get the federal government’s fiscal house back in order, lawmakers must make some tough decisions about our nation’s spending priorities and find much more significant spending cuts all across the federal budget.