Republican Attacks On GAO Escalate After Office Condemns DOGE Cuts
White House budget chief Russ Vought joined a few members of Congress who posted on social media in recent days downplaying the legitimacy of the office, which is an independent nonpartisan agency embedded within the legislative branch that makes recommendations for lawmakers to consider as part of its legislating. The GAO typically focuses on reviewing federal spending, making recommendations on cost savings and waste and investigating how policies are being put into practice by federal agencies. Last week it found that the Trump administration had violated the Impoundment Control Act when it withheld funding allocated by the Biden-era infrastructure law to build more electric vehicle charging stations around the country.
Trump allies are reportedly upset with the GAO about two other things, outside the impoundment finding (which was the outcome of just one of almost 40 investigations the office is currently conducting to look into the DOGE spending freezes of congressionally appropriated funding).
The head of GAO Gene Dodaro reportedly rebuffed Elon Musk when his DOGE pals tried to bring a team in to work on downsizing the agency, as it has done with several departments and independent agencies embedded within the executive branch. It is, of course, not an executive branch agency.
Last week, 'Senate Republicans disregarded GAO guidance and nixed waivers allowing California to set its own pollution standards, even after the watchdog concluded that the Senate couldn't do that under a simple-majority threshold,' Politico reported.
'Just so we are all clear over the next several months. The Government Accountability Office or GAO is a quasi-independent arm of the legislative branch that played a partisan role in the first-term impeachment hoax,' Vought said on Twitter last week, elevating an old MAGA talking point about the office being in cahoots with those trying to impeach Trump for his pressure campaign against then-new President Volodymyr Zelensky. (The GAO ruled after the House voted to impeach Trump the first time — and before the Senate trial — that Trump had violated the Impoundment Control Act when he froze U.S. military aid to Ukraine to try to get Zelensky to open an investigation into Hunter Biden.)
'They are going to call everything an impoundment because they want to grind our work to manage taxpayer dollars effectively to a halt. These are non-events with no consequence. Rearview mirror stuff,' Vought continued.
'GAO has lost credibility as an independent body,' Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) posted on Twitter over the weekend in response to the GAO ruling on the EV expansion funds.
'The GAO has no authority,' Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY) said last week.
While a Trump executive branch official undermining the credibility of an independent agency that serves as a check on his actions is not new, Trump's allies in Congress have at least, up until this point, tried to operate with a veneer of respect for offices and agencies within its purview. Even in the midst of Trump's Library of Congress power grab, some members of Republican leadership acknowledged that the President's actions may not have been proper.
The GAO is expected to release more rulings (which serve as non-binding recommendations to lawmakers) in coming weeks and months as it works its way through a pile of complaints about DOGE's potential Impoundment Control Act violations. Attacks on its legitimacy from lawmakers apparently unbothered by Trump's trampling of the separation of powers are expected to continue as well.
In his first few days as the DOJ's new pardon attorney, Ed Martin was hand delivered pardon applications for some Jan. 6 folks by a former classmate of President Trump's. Among those he personally reviewed: Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, as well as some members of the Proud Boys (some of those convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted, rather than receiving full pardons.)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is in hot water again. Per a new, bizarre story from The Guardian:
The White House has lost confidence in a Pentagon leak investigation that Pete Hegseth used to justify firing three top aides last month, after advisers were told that the aides had supposedly been outed by an illegal warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap.
The extraordinary explanation alarmed the advisers, who also raised it with people close to JD Vance, because such a wiretap would almost certainly be unconstitutional and an even bigger scandal than a number of leaks.
But the advisers found the claim to be untrue and complained that they were being fed dubious information by Hegseth's personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who had been tasked with overseeing the investigation.
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