The Trump Administration Keeps Ghosting Its Congressional Watchdog

A growing number of federal agencies are either refusing to provide the Government Accountability Office access to information or ignoring the congressional watchdog altogether.

Agencies have been stonewalling the GAO ever since President Donald Trump returned to office, to the point that GAO leadership told employees at a staff meeting in May that they’ve encountered “significant access issues” during the last year and a half, according to two sources familiar with the event and confirmed by GAO. Officials at that meeting cited the Office of Management and Budget, Housing and Urban Development, the Commerce Department, the Education Department and the Small Business Administration as particularly noncooperative.

None of those executive agencies responded to detailed questions this week about whether they are purposefully hindering oversight or the nature of their interactions with the legislative agency whose mission is to monitor government operations and identify waste, fraud and abuse.

During the May meeting, GAO general counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez told employees “there have been some outright denials,” sometimes from federal agencies who claim GAO lacks authority because the request came from a ranking member — which at the moment, means Democrats. In some cases, the office has been denied records and data it had received without any issues in the past.

In an interview last week, she told NOTUS that while the agency was encountering “access issues,” it was “working them through.”

It’s no surprise that the OMB is on the short list of federal agencies refusing to cooperate with the GAO. Russell Vought, OMB’s director, has made it his mission to expand presidential power over government agencies. OMB sent a particularly harsh letter to the GAO — and published it— when the watchdog agency started to investigate whether the Trump administration was abiding by the 1974 Impoundment Control Act in its rush to dismantle USAID. Mark Paoletta, the government-gutting lawyer Trump once deemed a “conservative warrior” who was then serving as OMB’s general counsel, chided the GAO’s requests as “voluminous, burdensome, and inappropriately invasive.”

Paoletta went on to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he sent another bellicose letter to the GAO when auditors explored whether CFPB could legitimately fulfill its legally mandated function as the Trump administration fired scores of its workforce. Paoletta railed against what he called GAO’s “arbitrary deadlines” and derided the group’s work as nothing more than an “incomplete” exercise “initiated at the behest of hyper-partisan Democrat members.”

The GAO study into CFPB had been requested by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the ranking member on the Senate banking committee, House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters and three other Democrats. In that study, GAO analysts described how the agency’s refusal to cooperate during much of 2025 forced them to look for answers by scouring public court filings in a CFPB lawsuit, Federal Register notices and even press releases — meaning it had about as much access to information as the average person with a computer.

“Stonewalling a nonpartisan congressional watchdog is another way that President Trump is trying to keep Congress and the American public in the dark about how his policies are hurting American families,” Warren said in a statement to NOTUS. “Congress should start sending subpoenas if the Trump administration won’t cooperate with legitimate oversight.”

In other instances, agencies have not responded to GAO’s emailed questions or even acknowledged that an audit is taking place. At the staff meeting last month, GAO leadership told analysts and directors who conduct those probes to consider accommodating reluctant federal agencies — for example, by narrowing requests — but to keep track of deadlines so that if agencies fail to respond, they can loop in supervisors or even members of Congress to apply pressure to those agencies. One GAO source pointed to an executive branch agency closely controlled by the Trump White House that has not participated at all in an ongoing audit that began last year — denying analysts even basic interviews to explain certain government operations under review.

And analysts are frustrated that longer delays make every “engagement,” as they’re referred to by the GAO, more expensive.

Liz Hempowicz, the deputy executive director of the government accountability nonprofit American Oversight, said she hadn’t heard that federal agencies were pushing back on GAO audits on partisan grounds, but she called the pushback “alarming.” She ascribed it to Republicans uniformly falling in line behind Trump on most issues, leading to tepid congressional oversight.

“Both GAO and these agencies are entities of the government meant to serve the American people. A ranking member represents a constituency of the American people the same way that a chair does. Treating that distinction as the be-all, end-all is just so insulting,” she said.

Janice Luong, a policy analyst at the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight said Congress needs to step in, particularly as the Trump administration consolidates power in the executive branch and chips away at Congress’ power of the purse.

“Congress should most definitely speak up and defend GAO and the legislative agency that provides them with resources on how dollars are spent — and holding the executive branch accountable,” she told NOTUS.

Some signs of the rising tensions have occasionally slipped into public view, but they’ve mostly been buried deep in monotonous congressional hearings or vaguely described in official reports.

In December, the previous head of the GAO, who retired when his 15-year tenure reached its statutory end, told a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee that “at this point, OMB’s not cooperating as much as we had in the past.”

“We used to have, you know, meetings with them,” then-Comptroller General Gene Dodaro said. “That’s not happening. I think it’s unfortunate because they can benefit from continued dialogue with us.”

The GAO has always run into some bureaucratic resistance from executive agencies when attempting to review government programs, no matter which political party is in the White House — a point agency officials emphasized to NOTUS.

The GAO’s annual report in 2024 said the Biden administration’s Department of Education had “regularly delayed providing information to which GAO has statutory access.” The agency had to get members of Congress to intervene. In the end, GAO analysts exposed errors that resulted in 432,000 fewer people — mostly prospective college students from poorer families — submitting a FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid. In one case, the government website instructed people to dial “7” for translation services, but that option didn’t exist on a call.

GAO insiders told NOTUS that executive agencies are naturally wary of outside inspectors. Spy agencies and the military are notoriously guarded. Federal agencies rarely turn over personnel data, even though government employees’ salaries are generally presumed to be a matter of public record.

From July 2024 to May 2025, the GAO looked into the consequences of Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s 11-month “blanket hold” on all senior military promotions during the Biden administration. Analysts concluded the blockade didn’t actually affect combat readiness — but they had to rely partly on public statements from Defense Department brass. None of the 12 generals, admirals or DOD civilian leaders would talk to the congressional watchdog agency.

The GAO is a legislative agency that belongs entirely to Congress and thus lies beyond Trump’s reach. When DOGE came knocking last year, NOTUS broke the news that GAO leadership rallied the troops with an email that reminded employees “we are not subject to DOGE or executive orders.”

In an interview last Friday, Emmanuelli Perez, the GAO general counsel, acknowledged some recent obstacles and pointed to what the agency had said in its year-end performance and accountability reports, the latest of which says, in government speak, that “FY 2025 was different.”

“We were seeing more delays. So we were saying, ‘OK, it’s getting really slow and that is having an impact.’ We saw that there is some information we routinely obtained in the past that now was either slowed down or we were having more trouble getting,” she told NOTUS.

Emmanuelli Perez said that despite the delays, “for most of our work, we’re getting what we need and we’re publishing our work.” Analysts who run into access problems can elevate the matter to higher-ups to intervene, but she said the agency doesn’t track how many engagements are running into walls.