A Strong GAO is Essential to Fiscal Responsibility and the Separation of Powers
Protecting Congressional Oversight in an Era of Executive Overreach
This is a guest post by Philip G. Joyce.
Over its more than 100 years of existence, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which serves as a support agency of Congress, has proved to be an essential tool for promoting fiscal responsibility, reducing waste in government, and supporting Congress in holding the executive branch accountable. In fulfilling its mission, it assists the Congress in ensuring that congressionally-mandated spending occurs consistent with the law, and in ways that do not promote waste and fraud. As such, GAO is one of the vital tools of congressional oversight.
In the past year, GAO has often found itself in a precarious position as it attempts to fulfill its statutory responsibility to identify presidential impoundments. The threat to GAO is even more acute because it is currently being led by an acting Comptroller General as a new head of the agency has yet to be named since the conclusion of Gene Dodaro’s term in December of 2025. An acting Comptroller General lacks the tenure protections and institutional authority of a Senate-confirmed Comptroller General, making them more exposed to political pressure or perceived as less able to withstand it. The Congress needs to insist that the next Comptroller General be someone who will continue to adhere to the core mission of the agency and protect the agency when it inevitably engages in activities that bring it into conflict with the executive branch.
GAO’s own recently issued Performance and Accountability Report includes myriad examples of the importance of GAO’s support of fiscal responsibility. GAO documents $62.7 billion of benefits that it recorded in fiscal year 2025 alone, bringing total GAO financial benefits from GAO recommendations to about $1.5 trillion since 2002. When you compare this to the rather haphazard and chaotic efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), it adds evidence to the argument that Don Kettl and I recently made in a column in Government Executive that GAO is “DOGE done right.”
A recent very thoughtful and well-researched report by Dan Lips and Soren Dayton from the Foundation for American Innovation reinforces the crucial role played by GAO, and includes a number of recommendations focused on the future of GAO. Their aim in making these suggestions is clearly not to bury the agency, but to strengthen it. I agree with most of their recommendations. In particular, they highlight the need to select a Comptroller General who is committed to modernizing the agency and emphasizing fiscal stewardship (I would add that, for the future, it also would be very useful to change the law to establish a new process for selecting a Comptroller General; there is no reason for a congressional staff appointment to be made by the President). The report also emphasizes the need for the executive branch to require federal agencies to fully cooperate with GAO’s requests. This has notably NOT been recent experience: OMB Director Russell Vought has instead argued that GAO “shouldn’t exist”.
While expressing admiration for the job that GAO has done, the authors do point out, appropriately, that some on Capitol Hill question the usefulness of some GAO reports and recommendations. There is some evidence of this even in GAO’s performance report, as the number of GAO testimonies declined from 60 to 46 between 2024 and 2025; perhaps most notably, the 46 testimonies represented just over half of the target of 90 testimonies that GAO had set for itself. To be clear, this is not itself evidence that GAO is doing anything wrong; it is likely that the majority in Congress does not want to highlight criticism of the executive branch. In response to these concerns, the report has useful suggestions concerning making sure that GAO recommendations are “actionable.”
There are some recommendations, however, that seem to me to be worth questioning. Their final recommendation expresses a desire for the next Comptroller General to avoid “unnecessary political conflict”. This seems a logical conclusion (I mean who wants to engage in “unnecessary” anything?), but this does cause one to ask whether, if GAO is doing its job, there is a certain amount of necessary conflict that is inevitable.
Let me be more specific. Their third recommendation, I think, gets to the crux of the tradeoffs between conflict and adherence to mission. In it, they argue that GAO should “no longer serve as Congress’s enforcement arm under the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), including the authority to litigate against the executive branch.”. They also argue that GAO should get out of the business of adjudicating contract protests, and that this responsibility should instead lie with “an executive agency such as the General Services Administration.”
Taking this last one first, I certainly understand how getting out of the bid protest game would reduce the potential for GAO to be involved in political conflict. But letting the executive branch investigate itself is neither in the interest of the contractors who are bringing these bid protests, nor is it in the national interest. Particularly at a time when Inspectors General have been neutered and where an increasingly large number of federal employees will be chosen on the basis of loyalty to a particular administration, any move to further reduce accountability of the executive branch would be particularly ill-advised.
What about GAO’s role under the ICA? Again, it would protect GAO if it didn’t have a responsibility to point out to the Congress when a given administration has violated the ICA by unilaterally impounding funds. Much of the antipathy that the Trump administration has for GAO, going all the way back to the Ukraine funding controversy that led to the impeachment of President Trump in his first term, stems from this responsibility. The broader responsibility to notify Congress when GAO believes that a violation has occurred, however, is central to the ability of Congress to stand up for itself against increasingly energetic uses of executive power. The protection of the power of the purse is essential to the maintenance of the separation of powers envisioned by the founders and doing so requires some objective evaluation of individual executive actions.
I agree that it would be better if the ICA was amended to explicitly empower members of Congress to bring suit in response to GAO findings that the administration has impounded funds without following the procedures laid out in the ICA. The current situation, in which courts have argued that only GAO can bring suit, seems overly constraining. That change itself, however, will not insulate GAO from controversy as long as it has the responsibility to call out ICA violations.
At a time when federal debt nears an all-time high as a percentage of GDP, and the separation of powers is seemingly under constant threat, a strong GAO—one that is fully empowered to investigate waste in government and to support the Congress in playing its constitutional role—is more important than ever. Weakening it—either by appointing a Comptroller General who will be less inclined to challenge executive branch actions or by taking away responsibilities in the interest of reducing conflict—is not in the interest of either the Congress, or the country.
Philip G. Joyce is professor of public policy in the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.