The $123-to-One Investment House Republicans Want to Cut
If you are serious about fighting government fraud and waste, the Government Accountability Office belongs near the top of your list of institutions worth protecting. It is nonpartisan, operates independently of the executive branch, and has no political stake in what it finds. It audits federal programs, documents waste and abuse, and tells Congress the truth about whether agencies are doing their jobs. And it is extraordinarily cost-effective. In fiscal year 2024 alone, GAO’s work generated a return of $76 for every dollar invested. Its six-year average is $123 to one.
GAO’s work is largely retrospective—it audits what has happened, documents systemic weaknesses, and pushes agencies to fix them. But GAO also performs a vital forward-looking role. It routinely recommends that agencies conduct fraud risk assessments, strengthen pre-payment controls, and build the kind of analytical capabilities that catch problems before money goes out the door. When those recommendations are implemented, they change how agencies operate going forward. GAO is less a fraud prevention tool in isolation than a forcing function for the executive branch agencies that are. In a federal government that loses hundreds of billions annually to fraud, that role creates sustained pressure to build better defenses in the first place.
A few weeks ago, the House Appropriations legislative branch subcommittee voted along party lines to approve a fiscal year 2027 spending bill that would slash GAO’s budget by 25 percent. If you’re feeling déjà vu, you should be. Last year, House Republicans advanced a plan to cut GAO’s budget by nearly 50 percent, paired with a provision that would have stripped the agency of its ability to sue the executive branch over illegal impoundment. The Senate blocked it. This year’s version is a smaller cut, but the direction is the same, and so is the timing. GAO has been one of the few institutions actively documenting cases where the executive branch has withheld congressionally appropriated funds in violation of the law. Cutting its budget and curtailing its independence while it is doing exactly that work is not a coincidence.
This pattern echoes what we saw with DOGE.
DOGE arrived with a mandate most Americans could support. The federal government loses staggering amounts to fraud each year— GAO itself has estimated losses as high as $521 billion annually. The appetite for reform was real. But DOGE’s approach consistently confused the institutions built to fight fraud with the fraud itself. It cut IRS auditors whose job is to recover money already legally owed. It hollowed out Inspector General offices across the federal government — agencies whose entire mandate is to find fraud, waste and abuse before it compounds. It reduced the DOJ unit responsible for prosecuting public corruption. In each case, the cut was framed as efficiency. In each case, the practical effect was to weaken the government’s ability to find and stop wrongdoing.
The proposed GAO cuts follow the same logic and risk the same result.
What makes GAO different from a standard government agency — and what makes cutting it particularly self-defeating — is that its value is inseparable from its independence. GAO doesn’t just identify savings. It tells Congress what is actually happening inside federal programs, including when agencies are failing, when money is being stolen or wasted at scale, and when the executive branch is acting outside its legal authority. That function only works if GAO can operate without political interference, follow its findings wherever they lead, and, when necessary, take legal action to enforce congressional intent.
A 25 percent budget cut doesn’t produce a leaner version of the same institution. It produces an agency that can conduct far fewer investigations, that must close out ongoing work, and defer the long-term audits that generate the largest returns. The fraud and waste GAO would have caught won’t disappear without the funding to uncover it, it will just go undetected.
The Senate blocked the most aggressive version of this last year. It should do so again. GAO’s 2027 budget request of $860 million is still less than a penny and a half for every dollar it returned to taxpayers in 2024 alone. Funding it at that level, protecting its independence, and leaving its legal authorities intact is among the most straightforward fraud-prevention investments on the table.
Rarely do we see a reform effort repeat the exact mistake it was designed to correct. DOGE spent a year dismantling the infrastructure that fights fraud in the name of fighting fraud. The House proposal to cut GAO by a quarter is trying to do it again — to the one agency whose entire purpose is to make sure that kind of failure gets documented.
Article first posted on GovIntegrity.