What Good is GAO?
The Government Accountability Office makes good recommendations. It is time Congress gives them teeth
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently celebrated 100 years of work. Most GAO engagements – audits, reviews, and requested analysis – are accompanied by nonpartisan recommendations to fix the problems GAO personnel identify throughout the course of its engagement. Nobody likes to be told what to do, least of all government employees. However because government employees are all but un-fireable, they are not incentivized to take any path but that of the least resistance. It's cliché, but money talks. Until Congress ties agency budgets to quality of work, agency bureaucrats will not be properly incentivized to improve the quality of their work. Therefore, Congress should consider giving each agency one full year to implement each new GAO recommendation not requiring congressional action, or cut the agency’s budget the following year.
Currently, there are 4,675 open recommendations. Of that amount, 498 are high priority. Agencies are currently earning the equivalent of a “C” grade, with only 75% of GAO recommendations being implemented within four years. The issue is that GAO is a purely advisory entity. There is no mechanism, other than shame, to ensure agencies and bureaucrats work to implement GAO recommendations or take them seriously whatsoever. In fact, agencies are permitted to – and often do – disagree with even the most basic GAO recommendations. For example, in 2020 GAO recommended the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration improve their collaboration over the regulation of cell-cultured meat, something both agencies jointly regulate. The agencies agreed with the recommendation, but refused to actually improve their collaboration. Instead the agencies responded by promising to put out a more detailed memorandum of understanding by March, 2022. No such MOU has been published seven months later.
This is not to suggest agencies or Congress are entirely asleep at the wheel when it comes to implementing GAO recommendations. In 12 years, federal agencies have implemented over 1,300 recommendations from GAO’s annual Duplication, Overlap, and Fragmentation report. Though 108 recommendations implemented annually may seem like a lot, these are just the low-hanging fruit. What’s more, only 56% of the easy recommendations have been fully implemented and just shy of 20% are partially addressed. Eliminating overlap, duplication, and fragmentation should be the least we expect from bureaucrats, but even that is too much to ask for, it seems.
Many GAO recommendations carry quantifiable cost savings. In instances in which GAO recommendations carry quantifiable cost savings, Congress should consider cutting agency budgets by commensurate amounts if they choose not to implement valid GAO recommendations which do not require congressional action. When there are no quantifiable savings but Congress believes the GAO recommendation to be valid, then it should cut the budget of the agency subdivision to which the recommendation is directed by 1%.
Each year, the Comptroller General, who heads GAO, writes letters to each head of agency detailing outstanding recommendations in need of administrative response and detailing new recommendations from the previous year. Which is to say, officials at the highest levels of agencies cannot feign ignorance as to the status of outstanding recommendations.
Of course under the Constitution, Congress is ultimately responsible for the quality, or lack thereof, of agency operations. Reflexively deferring to GAO would be no better than outsourcing it to unelected bureaucrats at agencies themselves. But Congress must increase its role in ensuring good governance by exercising its constitutional prerogative to appropriate funds. The committees of jurisdiction, as well as the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, must, each year, review outstanding GAO recommendations. They must start, as a parent would with a petulant child, start docking allowances until compliance is achieved.
GAO does yeoman’s work. But if it just releases reports with recommendations into the ether, with no obligation for agencies to take its recommendations seriously. One is left with the question, what good is GAO?