GAO has a blueprint for cost savings, but so far has gotten the cold shoulder from DOGE
In the weeks after President Donald Trump’s election last November, Elon Musk began highlighting Government Accountability Office reports that revealed the kinds of waste, fraud and abuse that the world’s richest man said his nascent DOGE office intended to target.
The GAO’s IT modernization reports and its high-risk list of federal government areas particularly vulnerable to mismanagement appeared to be especially low-hanging fruit for Musk and his surrogates, providing a blueprint for DOGE to stack up some quick wins.
But as Musk’s DOGE associates infiltrate government IT systems and take a “chainsaw” to the federal workforce, the GAO has barely had any contact with the group that has gutted agencies and drastically shaken up Washington in a matter of weeks, according to the watchdog’s top official.
Comptroller General Gene Dodaro said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Tuesday that he has not met with Musk or anyone from DOGE. A couple of GAO staffers did meet with DOGE liaisons to the Treasury Department to discuss audits of the general fund at the agency, he said.
“They had some questions about our report,” Dodaro said. “That’s the extent of it.”
Dodaro, who is retiring after more than 50 years at the GAO, including 15 in the top role, said he expects and anticipates “cooperation” from DOGE as the watchdog begins responding to several congressional requests to probe the accessing of various agency IT systems by Musk surrogates.
Cybersecurity experts have been especially critical of DOGE’s work in government computer systems, with some likening the activities to an ongoing data breach. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., asked Dodaro if the GAO — which has produced myriad cybersecurity improvement reports over the years — has ever recommended “that the federal government start bypassing security protocols and installing outside and unvetted software?” The watchdog has not, Dodaro replied.
Much of Tuesday’s hearing featured questioning from Democratic lawmakers on DOGE’s supposed cuts and what the GAO has found that would actually reduce costs. Dodaro told Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., the committee’s ranking member, that simply adopting all of the recommendations put forward by the GAO in its high-risk list would save $200 billion.
“And that’s a very conservative estimate,” Dodaro said. “I think it could be more, much more.”
A huge chunk of the Trump administration’s cuts so far are in personnel, with massive workforce reductions ongoing at agencies including the IRS, USAID, the Department of Veterans Affairs and many more. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., asked Dodaro whether firing every civil servant would make a dent in the federal debt.
“The total federal payroll is less than 10% of the federal government’s expenditures,” Dodaro said. “You could eliminate almost the entire discretionary part of the budget … and still not really make an impact long term on the deficit path that we’re on right now.”
As an independent, nonpartisan office, GAO did not hear from Musk or DOGE about agency firings. “It’s really not our role to be consulted on personnel decisions in the executive branch,” Dodaro said. But the comptroller general left the door open for potential investigations into whether those decisions “were made in accordance with law and merit principles,” and he was generally critical about what several Democratic lawmakers referred to as “indiscriminate” dismissals.
“I would not consider it a best practice,” Dodaro said. “I’ve spent most of my career … butting heads with the bureaucracies across the government. There’s a need for change, but how you do it matters. And going about it in the way that’s being done now can cause some short-term problems for the government because it can create other vulnerabilities, unintended vulnerabilities.”
Many Oversight Republicans were largely dismissive of Democrats’ concerns about federal workforce reductions, accusing the minority party members of enabling government waste and fraud while being wholly unsupportive of Musk’s work. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., asked Dodaro if he supported DOGE’s efforts.
“There’s probably nobody in the government that wants the government to be more efficient and effective than we do at the GAO, and I do personally,” Dodaro said, listing cost-saving initiatives including one to help stop payments to dead people and extending the statute of limitations on unemployment insurance fraud.
“If Congress doesn’t act soon, some of the fraudsters are likely to get away,” he said. “So those things are really important and, I think, should be bipartisan.”
