It’s a tale as old as January 2025: GOP lawmakers believe their primary job is to assist President Donald Trump in doing whatever he wants—even if “whatever he wants” means “turn Congress into a relic with no power.” Their latest move is to join with the White House in attacking the Government Accountability Office.
The Trump administration would very much like to stop the GAO from investigating any Trump spending actions or determining whether those actions violate the law, despite that being the GAO’s actual job. The White House found a friend in House Republicans, who have eagerly proposed cutting the GAO’s budget by half to make sure it can’t do its work.
There’s no question that the average Republican member of Congress is not exactly a history buff, but it isn’t hard to learn that Congress itself created the GAO more than a century ago and expanded its role in the budgeting process over 50 years ago. The GAO issues legal decisions on the Impoundment Control Act—the one Trump keeps ignoring by just refusing to spend funds appropriated by Congress. The GAO is also literally part of the legislative branch, which is why congressional Republicans just rolling over and showing their tummies to Trump is so maddening.
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More maddening even is that the GAO is actually responsible for the things that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was pretending to be responsible for when it was taking a blowtorch to the whole of government. The GAO’s efforts to root out waste and fraud have resulted in $725 billion in financial benefits since 2011. Their most recent report identified $100 billion in estimated savings that would have been realized by adopting GAO efficiency recommendations. In contrast, the Elon Musk-led DOGE pretty much just made up numbers that were convenient, promising trillions in cuts, then billions, then—wait! Please just don’t mention that DOGE’s reign of terror somehow resulted in an increase in government spending over a comparable period in 2024.
Remember the laughably fake DOGE dashboard, which was supposed to be the most transparent ever but instead is just a hodgepodge list of agencies that look like you could click through but lol you cannot. The promised $2 trillion in DOGE savings has melted down to $190 billion, even if one takes that at face value—which you definitely should not.
But did you know that GAO used to have an actual dashboard with actual data, and that the Trump administration took down because it said it revealed sensitive information? Sure, yeah. On Monday, in response to a lawsuit by two watchdog groups, a federal judge ordered the site restored because there of a 2022 congressional mandate that spending decisions be published online. Let’s face it, though: Lower court orders don’t mean anything, because ultimately the administration will just go to the Supreme Court and beg them to wipe out the decision—likely successfully. But for now, we can bask in the administration’s loss.
If congressional Republicans weren’t so eager to let Trump radically upend the separation of powers that is core to American democracy, they’d be outraged at his administration’s attempts to neuter a legislative branch watchdog. But that watchdog is so pesky, finding that the administration illegally withheld funds on not just one, but two occasions. For what it’s worth, the administration’s stance is what it always is: No other branch of government can tell it what to do, anything that is adverse to the administration is a partisan attempt to undermine Trump’s agenda, and they’re just going to ignore it.
Ultimately, stomping on the GAO makes sense for the administration, as it is eager to eliminate any obstacles to its attempts to consolidate all power in the executive branch and to allow the administration to keep its spending opaque and unchallenged. For Republicans in Congress, though, it makes no sense to stand aside while Trump takes their power away. So they’re not standing aside. They’re going to help instead.
Sure, that means ceding congressional power to Trump, but what’s a little destruction of the separation of powers between friends?