The head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) told senior House Appropriations Committee leaders in a June 25 letter that a 48 percent cut to GAO’s budget approved earlier this week by the committee’s Legislative Branch Subcommittee would have “grave, pervasive” effects on the agency’s ability to serve as the investigative arm of Congress.
The subcommittee on June 23 voted to approve a $415 million budget for GAO for fiscal year (FY) 2026 – marking a 48 percent year-over-year cut from GAO’s budget of $811.9 million in FY2025.
The Republican-led subcommittee voted in favor of that budget cut against vociferous opposition from Democratic members of the panel who said the move reflects anger from the White House over GAO’s ongoing role in investigating whether the administration can withhold spending for congressionally approved programs.
In his June 25 letter to Appropriations leaders, GAO’s Gene Dodaro explained that 95 percent of the agency’s work is mandated or requested by Congress and individual legislators, while the remainder is conducted under his authority as comptroller general of the U.S. and is largely focused on high-risk areas facing government agencies.
Dodaro said the reduced budget, should it receive final approval by Congress, would require an immediate staff reduction of at least 2,200 people, representing 63 percent of GAO’s workforce – leaving GAO with “skeletal staffing.”
That workforce reduction in turn would eat into the billions of dollars of savings that GAO’s work produces each year, he said, much of which is accomplished through the agency’s work to identify fraud, waste, and abuse across the government.
The budget reduce would also reverse “congressional direction to build Congress’s in-house science and technology expertise,” Dodaro said.
“At the direction of Congress, we have tripled the size of our science and technology capacity since 2019,” he said. “This has allowed us to better support Congress as it seeks to understand how emerging technology intersects with public policy, such as artificial intelligence, low orbit manufacturing, and quantum computing.”
The increased focus on science and tech issues “has allowed us to issue 32 technology assessments on current and emerging issues such as generative artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, and regenerative medicine,” the DoD chief said. “Our capacity in this space would regress, and we would lose highly specialized talent.”
Dodaro’s June 25 letter was first surfaced by Punchbowl News, and later confirmed to MeriTalk by a GAO spokesperson.