Abstract
The Government Accountability Office (GAO—originally the General Accounting Offices) was created in the same statute as OMB in 1921. It has undergone major transformations over its history. In the second half of the twentieth century, it transitioned from an accounting agency to one that focuses on program evaluation. After draconian budget cuts in the wake of the Republican takeover in Congress in 1995, GAO took greater care to ensure that it was serving both the majority and minority in Congress equally. As a result of these transitions, the ethos of neutral competence is strong at the agency. Key to protecting this ethos is the 15-year term of the comptroller general which shields the agency from the vicissitudes of political change. That said, there were some incidents during the Trump Administration that raised concerns, and the lack of cooperation from some agencies during the Trump Administration made GAO’s program evaluation task more difficult.
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Notes
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Id.
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Justification for this level of independence goes all the way back to James Madison who in the first Congress sponsored a bill that noted that the comptroller had quasi-judicial functions and hence should be treated differently than other appointees (Mosher 1979).
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64 stat 832
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P.L. 99-177
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106 S. Ct. 3181; 92 L. Ed. 2d 583; 1986 U.S. LEXIS 141
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Letter from the Department of Homeland Security to GAO. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/20_0817_ogc_gao-as1-succession-response.pdf (last viewed April 6, 2022)
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The GAO general counsel supervises the adjudication of bid protests, challenges to the terms of federal awards, or contracts. https://www.gao.gov/legal/bid-protests (last viewed February 3, 2022). There were more than 2000 of these in 2021 (GAO 2021a). The volume of bid protests has grown dramatically over the history of GAO from a few in the agency’s early days to more than 800 under Elmer Staats, to the numbers today (Mosher 1979).
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https://www.gao.gov/assets/2021-07/gao-org-chart.pdf (last viewed February 3, 2022)
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See midsize agency rankings here where GAO was #1 https://bestplacestowork.org/rankings/?view=overall&size=small&category=leadership& (last viewed June 29, 2022).
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Shapiro, S. (2023). The Government Accountability Office: Redefining But Maintaining Neutral Competence. In: Trump and the Bureaucrats. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22079-1_5
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