There’s a move afoot to bypass the law and politicize the appointment of the head of GAO, Congress’s “watchdog” agency, during the lame duck session of Congress. Doing so would undermine the agency’s credibility as an objective, nonpartisan source of federal oversight and thereby severely limit its value to Congress and the public. This can’t be allowed to succeed.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a legislative branch agency known as the congressional “watchdog.” It supports Congress in the exercise of its constitutional oversight and legislative functions by conducting evaluations of programs and activities throughout the federal government and recommending improvements. Its recommendations produced over $62 billion in taxpayer savings for fiscal year 2025 along with many non-monetary benefits. GAO works for Republicans and Democrats alike. It has an unblemished reputation for independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. In fact, it’s the only source of wholly independent, nonpartisan oversight within the federal government.
GAO is headed by a Comptroller General, who serves a statutory 15-year term of office. For reasons that once made sense but don’t anymore (see below), the Comptroller General is appointed by the president subject to Senate confirmation. When a vacancy in the office arises, the law provides for a bicameral, bipartisan congressional commission made up of ten prominent members of Congress to recommend at least three nominees to the president. Presidents nominated the last three Comptrollers General from the commission’s recommendations and all three were confirmed with broad bipartisan support. All served honorably, upholding GAO’s core values of independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship.
A vacancy arose last December when Comptroller General Gene Dodaro completed his 15-year term, thereby theoretically activating the congressional commission. Unlike in the case of past vacancies, however, the congressional commission failed to initiate the usual process of developing, vetting and interviewing potential nominees to recommend to the president. Evidently, it did nothing at all for most of this year.
That changed dramatically this week. On Wednesday evening, Senator Rand Paul, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who is one of the commission members and apparently in charge of the process this time, notified Democratic members of the commission that they had 24 hours to submit names of potential Comptroller General nominees. His Senate Committee then posted a notice of a November 19 hearing to consider “a nominee” to be Comptroller General. The process is so rushed that the nominee was unnamed. It’s been reported that the Trump administration wants to nominate Eric Ueland, now Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).[1]See here, here, here, here, and here for background.
Obviously, the White House is orchestrating this effort that effectively bypasses the statutory process in order to install a Trump apparatchik as Comptroller General during the Republican-controlled lame duck session of the current Congress. This scheme makes a mockery of the Comptroller General appointment law. It excludes minority party commission members (and perhaps some majority party members as well) from meaningful participation. It turns the law on its head by having the president dictate to the commission who he wants so that they can regurgitate that name in their “recommendations” to him. The Democratic members promptly condemned the effort as the “sham” that it clearly is.
But it’s worse than just an effort to bend the law and established norms to place a favored individual in office. At its core, it’s a duplicitous attempt to sabotage GAO and impede the new Congress by stymieing oversight of the Trump administration. This administration has engaged in unprecedented resistance to GAO going far beyond the tension that occasionally exists between GAO and executive agencies. In fact, the administration seethes hostility. OMB Director Russell Vought maintains that GAO “shouldn’t exist.” His agency sought to impede GAO’s work by prodding Congress to make draconian cuts to its budget and enact restrictions on its ability to challenge illegal impoundments. Many others in the administration probably share this disdain for GAO, perhaps including Vought’s loyal deputy and potential nominee for Comptroller General.
At the risk of being naïve, hopefully there are enough Republican senators with the integrity and respect for GAO as well as Congress’s own institutional interests to join with Democrats to defeat this scheme. But what then? It seems highly unlikely that the Trump administration and the new congressional majorities can agree on a mutually acceptable Comptroller General candidate. That would leave a stalemate in which GAO continues to operate under an acting official perhaps until after the 2028 elections.
The far better alternative is for Congress to remove the president from the Comptroller General appointment process altogether. When GAO was established in 1921, it inherited mainly executive functions from the Treasury Department that had to be performed by a presidential appointee. Over the years, GAO’s functions underwent a fundamental evolution. Today’s GAO works virtually exclusively for Congress as a legislative branch agency. Indeed, the Supreme Court held in a 1986 decision that GAO was part of the legislative branch and the Comptroller General was an agent of Congress who was constitutionally precluded from performing executive functions. Thus, there is no longer any legal reason for the president to appoint the Comptroller General.[2]See here for background. With the possible exception of Impoundment Control Act enforcement, which is a subject for another day, any arguably residual executive functions still vested by law in GAO … Continue reading
Moreover, it stands to reason that Congress should appoint the head of its own watchdog agency. Congress has already assumed or is in the process of assuming control over the appointment of the heads of all other legislative branch agencies that were formerly led by presidential appointees. These changes were accomplished through bipartisan legislation. It would be well beyond incongruous to leave GAO as the one remaining legislative agency headed by a presidential appointee. The change in appointment could be accomplished simply by retaining the current commission process but empowering the commission to select the Comptroller General rather than recommend names to the president.
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