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The U.S. federal government is the world’s largest and most complex organizational entity, with about $3.5 trillion in outlays in fiscal year 2012 funding a broad array of programs and operations. GAO maintains a program to focus attention on government operations that it identifies as high risk due to their greater vulnerability to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement or the need for transformation to address economy, efficiency, or effectiveness challenges. Solutions to high-risk problems, such as those listed in this section, offer the potential to save billions of dollars, improve service to the public, and strengthen the performance and accountability of the U.S. government:

• Strategic Human Capital Management. Addressing complex challenges such as disaster response, national and homeland security, and economic stability requires a high-quality federal workforce able to work seamlessly with other agencies and levels of government and across sectors. However, current budget and long-term fiscal pressures, coupled with a potential wave of employee retirements that could produce gaps in leadership and institutional knowledge, threaten the government’s capacity to effectively address these and many other evolving national issues. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), individual agencies, and Congress have all taken important steps in recent years that will better position the government to close current and emerging critical skills gaps that are undermining agencies’ abilities to meet their vital missions. Although progress has been made, the area remains high risk because more work is needed in implementing specific corrective strategies for addressing critical skills gaps and evaluating their results. GAO added this area to its High Risk List in 2001.

• Managing Federal Real Property. The federal government faces long-standing problems in managing federal real property, including effectively managing excess and underutilized property, an overreliance on leasing, and protecting federal facilities. The government has given high-level attention to this issue and has made progress in real property management, but the underlying challenges that hamper reform remain. Specifically, the government continues to lack consistent, accurate, and useful data to support decision making. In addition, competing stakeholder interests regarding the disposition of excess real property and legal requirements such as those related to environmental cleanup also present challenges. The Federal Protective Service (FPS) has struggled to effectively target limited resources for protecting federal facilities.