Updated May 23, 2025 at 10:31 AM CDT
When the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, attempted last week to assign a team to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the move followed a months-long offensive by DOGE staffers who have strong-armed their way into federal agencies, accessed sensitive data, and helped fire thousands of workers.
But doing that at GAO would violate the basic structure of the federal government, says David Walker, a former head of the agency.
"The DOGE team needs to read the Constitution again," Walker told NPR. "There are three separate and equal branches of government."
The GAO is an influential watchdog agency that operates under the legislative branch — Congress, not the White House. GAO leaders refused DOGE's request to embed staffers at the agency.
"DOGE has zero authority to review GAO's operations," Walker said.
That said, GAO and DOGE supposedly have a very similar mission, says Walker, who has been nominated to Senate-confirmed positions by both Republican and Democratic presidents over the years.
Both GAO and DOGE are supposed to root out waste, fraud and abuse. But GAO has been doing that for decades, has a staff of several thousand people and, Walker says, is really good at it.
"GAO is like a longstanding professional football team and DOGE has some very bright people, but it's more like a much smaller pickup football team from MIT," Walker said. "It's like intramurals!"
Walker is among the government experts who think DOGE would have been well served to more closely follow GAO's lead.
Over the past 15 years GAO says its recommendations have resulted in $725 billion in savings and revenue increases.
And it recently unveiled an updated list of proposals that it says could save another $100 billion or more. For example, GAO has been studying a space-based laser communications system that the Defense Department is designing, and GAO says it has found a tweak to the program that could save hundreds of millions of dollars.
The White House did not respond to NPR's request for comment for this story but has defended DOGE for finding waste, fraud and abuse throughout the federal government.
The current head of GAO, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, recently told Congress that DOGE lately has been engaging more with the office about some of its recommendations.
Still, Walker says poor planning and inadequate coordination with Congress have hamstrung DOGE, which he says so far has mostly been targeting programs the Trump administration just doesn't like, and indiscriminately firing people.
"DOGE way over-promised on savings, originally promising $2 trillion," he said. "They now claim that they've saved about $170 billion, but in reality I think the real savings is maybe one-10th to one-fifth of what they claim because only Congress can cut spending." NPR reviews have found DOGE's savings claims overstated.
Other government efficiency experts say DOGE could have learned a lot from GAO.
"One of the real tragedies of the whole DOGE effort is that they just ignored this kind of expertise and they didn't tap into the knowledge base of the people already working in government," said Linda Bilmes, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Bilmes says the chance to work alongside Elon Musk to help reform the government lured in a lot of very talented young people. She said she knows that firsthand because some of them were students of hers at Harvard.
"But it was another enormous missed opportunity because they were not leveraged in terms of their own talents," she said. "They were put in charge of a website that they had no idea what it was, and asked to fire people, and they really were put into positions which they were entirely unsuited for."
DOGE's effort to embed itself in GAO raises another thorny issue.
GAO currently has investigations underway into whether the Trump administration improperly froze funding that was already allocated by Congress.
"We have, right now, 39 different investigations underway," Dodaro told Senate lawmakers at an April 29 hearing. "We're trying to get the information from the agencies about what their legal position is for not expending the money."
On Thursday, GAO determined that the Trump administration had violated the Impoundment Control Act regarding grants administered by the Department of Transportation. The act allows the comptroller general to file a lawsuit if the president illegally impounds funds.
On Friday morning, Russ Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, criticized GAO, writing: "They are going to call everything an impoundment because they want to grind our work to manage taxpayer dollars effectively to a halt."
For Walker, the former head of GAO, the probes into the administration's actions mean DOGE has a clear "conflict of interest there. DOGE shouldn't be anywhere close to looking at what GAO is doing in connection with those activities."
But Dodaro will not be leading GAO that much longer. His term is up in December of this year. When that happens, the rules say Dodaro will appoint an acting comptroller general. A bipartisan commission from the House and Senate will then send a list of candidates from which Trump will choose a nominee, who must then be confirmed by the Senate.
"It is critically important that the next comptroller general have bipartisan support," Walker said. He said the new head of GAO also must be able to act independently from the White House.
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