Agencies have only completed about half of GAO’s COVID-19 recommendations

Federal agencies have not implemented roughly half of the 428 recommendations that the Government Accountability Office has made to improve preparedness following the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed 1.2 million Americans. 

In a report published on Aug. 1, the watchdog reviewed its oversight work concerning COVID-19 and the approximately $4.65 trillion Congress provided in response. GAO found that agencies haven’t addressed 220 of its recommendations. 

“Reflecting on federal agencies’ emergency response actions and our recommendations can reveal lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for federal agencies. These lessons can help federal agencies identify actions that successfully facilitated the implementation of the federal response and should be incorporated into future emergency response plans. Other lessons can help federal agencies identify weaknesses in their response to the pandemic and identify areas for improvement,” GAO investigators wrote. 

Many of the recommendations relate to areas on GAO’s high risk list of federal programs and operations that are vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement or are in need of transformation. Those areas are: Health and Human Services Department’s leadership and coordination of public health emergencies; Labor Department’s unemployment insurance system; Small Business Administration’s emergency loans to small businesses. 

GAO included HHS’ public health management on the high risk list in 2022, saying its COVID-19 response “compounded our long-standing concerns” about the department’s ability to lead during national public health emergencies and extreme weather events. The watchdog the same year added the unemployment insurance system partly due to fraud risks. 

The oversight agency estimated in 2023 that pandemic unemployment fraud cost the federal government $100 billion to $135 billion. In response, DOL said that range was likely an overestimate but did not dispute that there was significant fraud in the program. 

Some of the open recommendations include:

• HHS’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response should establish specific goals and performance measures for its new hiring office, among other workforce tasks. 
• DOL should design and implement an anti-fraud strategy for unemployment insurance programs. 
• SBA should develop a strategy for communicating with applicants for disaster assistance, including guidelines for when information needs to be provided to such individuals throughout a disaster. 

GAO also made a new recommendation in the Aug. 1 report for the Treasury Department to include lessons from the COVID-19 emergency financial assistance provided to the aviation industry as part of its ongoing efforts to compile resources in preparation for future financial disasters. Treasury agreed with the recommendation. 

Similarly, GAO in May determined HHS still has not resolved systemic issues that states experienced when requesting and receiving items from the strategic national stockpile during the COVID-19 and mpox public health emergencies.