Congressional Democrats say top Republicans are trying to rush the process of selecting the next head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) — a watchdog agency housed within the Legislature — to allow President Donald Trump to appoint one of his allies to the post before Democrats regain control of Congress in January.
A group of senior Democrats tasked with recommending candidates to be the next GAO chief — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-CA) — released a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying Republicans had given them “less than 24 hours” to submit their submissions. candidates.
“This is clearly a sham to allow President Trump to nominate a hand-picked nominee to lead Congress’s watchdog,” Democrats said in the joint statement. “We cannot allow President Trump to put a fox in the henhouse of an agency that Congress relies on to provide independent, nonpartisan oversight and expose waste, fraud, and abuse within the Trump Administration. »
The GAO — the nonpartisan federal agency that reviews how federal taxpayer dollars are spent — was led by Comptroller General Gene Dodaro until last year. Dodaro, who led the agency for 15 years, retired at the end of 2025. The agency is currently led by Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown while it waits for Trump to name its next permanent leader.
Now Democrats say Trump, in yet another lame bid for power, is trying to fast-track one of his allies into the helm of the agency that has been a thorn in the side of his administration. Since Trump took office in January, the GAO has issued several decisions finding impoundment violations by the Trump administration. Whoever is named the next Comptroller General will inherit ongoing investigations into the same issues of executive overreach.
Although the agency has repeatedly concluded that the Trump administration violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, it has taken no action to sue the Trump administration for the violations it identified — despite some bipartisan support from congressional lawmakers. A Trump loyalist leading the charge at GAO will effectively ensure that an impound violation trial will likely never happen.
Experts have feared for some time that Trump would replace Dodaro with a loyalist who would run the agency for the next 15 years.
“It is very likely that Gene Dodaro will be replaced by a Trump stooge,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal fiscal policy at the Center for American Progress, told TPM just before Dodaro retired.
Kogan said that if Dodaro was replaced by a Trump loyalist, he feared the agency would stop doing “the important part of what it does, which is investigations, public oversight and accountability.”
The Washington Sun reported in October that the administration had floated the idea of appointing Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Deputy Director Eric Ueland to lead the GAO. He is a key ally of President Trump who has worked closely with OMB Director Russ Vought, the lead orchestrator of the Trump administration’s efforts to seize funds authorized by Congress.
After Dodaro retired, a bipartisan group of lawmakers — consisting of the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, the Senate and House Minority Leaders, the President Pro Tempore, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee — was supposed to meet and recommend a replacement for the president. President Donald Trump would then nominate a nominee subject to Senate confirmation.
But nearly a year later, Democrats on the panel say “Republican leadership has never called the Commission for meetings, and the Commission has not interviewed a single candidate for this critical role, despite repeated requests to begin the process over the past two years.”
The lack of urgency and bipartisanship, top Democrats added, run “contrary to the last time a GAO monitor was selected in 2010 during a year-long bipartisan process.”
“Every member of Congress who values independent oversight and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars should denounce this for what it is: a transparent effort to crush another Trump crony at the 11th hour and undermine Congress’s ability to provide effective oversight of the Trump administration,” the Democrats said.
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