The Government Accountability Office GAO

The Budget and Accounting Act of June 10, 1921, gave the President a budget for the first time and, as a counterweight, gave Congress an independent auditor. The General Accounting Office took over the Treasury's auditing functions and for its first decades checked vouchers, millions of them, to confirm that money had been spent as the law allowed. After World War II it shifted toward evaluating whether programs worked at all, and in 2004 Congress renamed it the Government Accountability Office to reflect that change while keeping the initials.

GAO audits and investigates nearly every part of the federal government at the request of congressional committees and members or on its own initiative under statutory mandates. It issues hundreds of reports a year, publishes the biennial High Risk List of programs most vulnerable to waste, fraud, and mismanagement, audits the government's consolidated financial statements, which have never received a clean opinion, and conducts undercover tests of agency controls. It also issues legal decisions on how appropriations law applies, decides bid protests from contractors who lose federal contracts, and rules on whether a President has illegally withheld funds under the Impoundment Control Act.

The Comptroller General, who leads GAO, is appointed by the President from a list recommended by a bipartisan congressional commission and serves a single fifteen-year term, the longest of any federal official other than judges, so that no President can easily remove an auditor whose findings are inconvenient. The agency has about 3,500 employees and reports that its work yields tens of billions of dollars in financial benefits a year, a return of roughly eighty dollars for every dollar of its budget.

GAO's impoundment rulings put it in the middle of a constitutional fight in 2025. It found that the administration had illegally withheld funds Congress appropriated in several programs, from Head Start to electric vehicle charging, while the White House budget office argued the Impoundment Control Act itself was unconstitutional and declined to follow GAO's conclusions. GAO has authority to sue to release withheld funds but has rarely used it. Gene Dodaro's fifteen-year term as Comptroller General ended in December 2025, leaving the choice of his successor to a process that requires the President and Congress to agree.