Congress
The government’s top watchdog is retiring — but the Trump probes continue
Gene Dodaro started his career at what is now the Government Accountability Office in 1973, as then-President Richard Nixon was battling Congress for control of federal cash.
More than a half-century later, Dodaro runs that watchdog agency amid another epic clash between Capitol Hill and the White House over President Donald Trump’s funding moves. Now, with his 15-year term as comptroller general coming to an end in late December, he’s getting ready to retire.
“I’m going into witness protection,” Dodaro, 74, said in a recent interview of his upcoming departure from the independent office with a workforce of more than 3,000.
He meant it as a joke. But Dodaro’s agency, which is tasked with auditing federal programs and helping lawmakers fulfill their constitutional duties, has been under an unprecedented level of scrutiny this year as conservative lawmakers and the White House publicly challenge GAO’s objectivity and seek to undermine its influence.
Adding to the pressure on Dodaro, the Supreme Court this fall appeared to endorse the view that only the comptroller general has the authority to sue the Trump administration for flouting impoundment law — not the groups losing out on federal cash.
Dodaro has declined to take such legal action, despite the urging of some lawmakers, including Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins. “People are already suing in many cases,” he reasoned, adding that the court’s decision “surprised” him and that he won’t be “cajoled” into suing.
“We’ll see what we need to do. But we need to be prudent and make sure that — when we do it — we’re in the strongest possible position to prevail,” he added.
Following the Supreme Court’s opinion, Collins said in a brief interview that it “goes without saying” this dynamic underscores the need for the lawmakers involved in the selection process to find a strong candidate to succeed Dodaro.
Dodaro’s last day is Dec. 29, at which point he will hand-pick an acting comptroller general to take the reins of the agency until the Senate confirms a permanent replacement. A panel of 10 lawmakers seated on a bipartisan commission is supposed to suggest candidates for Trump to nominate.
Whoever succeeds Dodaro will have to direct ongoing probes into Trump’s funding moves. To date, the agency has issued 11 opinions — five concluding the administration illegally withheld money, two citing some wrongdoing. Dozens are ongoing.
“The worst thing for GAO is to look like you have an agenda. That’s what concerns me about allegations like we’re against the current president’s agenda. We’re not,” he said. “Our job, and most of what we’re doing, is in response to actions they’ve taken. It’s not things we’re bringing up out of nowhere.”
Because the Office of Management and Budget has stonewalled GAO’s requests for information, the agency is forced to rely on evidence in the many lawsuits against the administration, Dodaro said.
Moreover, the GAO head said he has never spoken to Trump’s budget chief, Russ Vought. Multiple attempts to make contact during the first Trump administration were unsuccessful, he added.
“His public comments have led me to believe that wouldn’t be a successful approach here,” Dodaro said of Vought, who on social media this spring accused the office of taking a “partisan role in the first-term impeachment hoax,” a reference to GAO’s conclusion that Trump illegally withheld aid to Ukraine in 2019.
The past 11 months have been politically difficult for Dodaro in other ways. Earlier this year, top Republicans derided GAO for not blessing Senate GOP efforts to skirt filibuster rules to overturn state waivers issued under former President Joe Biden for pollution standards — and ignored the agency’s conclusion to boot.
Dodaro fended off Elon Musk’s attempt to send a downsizing team to GAO as part of the president’s now-disbanded Department of Government Efficiency initiative, before House Republicans proposed cutting the agency’s budget in half for the current fiscal year.
It’s not the first time the comptroller general has irked a party in power. During the Biden administration, GAO delivered its first-ever estimate of fraud in the federal government, pegging losses at between $233 billion and $521 billion dollars a year.
“OMB wasn’t happy,” Dodaro recalled.
Dodaro’s agency doesn’t always disappoint Republicans. Just last week, GOP lawmakers cheered a new GAO report reinforcing their arguments about fraud in the Obamacare insurance marketplace. To investigate this claim, GAO set up 24 fake accounts; 22 successfully enrolled in plans. It ended up costing the federal government thousands of dollars a month.
And Congress has averted several crises as a direct result of the watchdog’s warnings. That includes action to replace crucial weather satellites before they fail and to buoy the federal insurance program designed to protect Americans whose pension benefits are at risk.
“GAO is incredibly valuable … the ability for Congress to ask a hard question and ask them to chase it,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who added that Dodaro has for years aided him in a running effort to compel federal agencies to identify and describe each program they oversee.
Dodaro also started a partnership with experts at the National Academy of Sciences and launched an international effort to help developing countries run audit offices.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who is supposed to serve on the commission to recommend candidates for a Senate-confirmed comptroller general, said lawmakers “won’t find anybody as experienced and as knowledgeable” as Dodaro. “The integrity and professionalism he brought to the job, I thought, was exceptional.”
Dodaro attributes any praise to decades of relationship maintenance, including with top Trump administration officials who used to be members of Congress and senators who formerly served in the House.
“I try to pull out all the stops on my Italian charm,” he joked. “We’re not only in the auditing business. We’re in the relationship business.”
The next comptroller general could be anyone, and it could be a long time before that person is seated. Dodaro is the only Senate-confirmed GAO chief who was picked from inside the agency, and he held the position in an acting capacity for more than two years before then-President Barack Obama nominated him upon the recommendation of lawmakers. The Senate confirmed him by unanimous consent in 2010.
“If it can be done quickly, that’s fine. If it can’t, then they need to take their time to get the right person in the job, because it’s 15 years,” Dodaro said of the selection process for his successor.
“I have great confidence in the people at GAO … and I have confidence in the Congress to take their responsibility seriously and pick someone. This is their person — to serve them.”
Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday he plans to deploy an unusual procedural maneuver in a bid to unfreeze the House floor this week, seeking to send the annual Pentagon policy bill and the GOP elections bill known as the SAVE America Act to the Senate in a single package.
That is likely a recipe for a continued standoff between the two chambers over the SAVE America Act, which has stalled in the Senate for months due to internal GOP divides. Under Johnson’s plan, the annual defense policy bill, which typically passes every year with large bipartisan majorities, could become a collateral victim of the impasse.
Asked in brief interview if he had talked to Senate Majority Leader John Thune about his plans, Johnson replied, “I have to do my job in the House, and they’ve got to do their job in the Senate, so we’ll see what happens.”
Johnson is seeking to placate House conservative hard-liners, led by Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who have threatened to oppose the procedural measures that give Republicans control of the floor unless they agree to tougher tactics meant to force the Senate into passing the elections bill.
House GOP leaders discussed the plan to merge the two bills over the weekend as Luna pushed to amend the defense bill directly.
She did not say in an interview Monday whether Johnson’s gambit would suffice: “We want it baked together, not able to be stripped out,” she said.
But the Senate is free to work its own will, and members of that chamber are likely to reject any defense bill that has the partisan elections bill attached. That would set the stage for GOP leaders to strip it out when the House and Senate hash out the differences between their competing Pentagon bills later this year.
Johnson, meanwhile, is pushing a separate plan to pass a slimmed-down version of the SAVE America Act through the party-line budget reconciliation process — an option hard-liners have all but rejected.
“I don’t think that that can be done,” Luna told reporters Monday.
He’s also facing another complication: The version of the SAVE America Act he is proposing to attach to the Pentagon bill doesn’t include the latest demands for the bill from President Donald Trump — including a near-total ban on mail voting that is opposed by many Republicans.
Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
Lawmakers of both parties questioned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and top Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff Monday in the first broad congressional briefings on President Donald Trump’s Iran deal.
While Democrats asked some of the sharpest questions, participants in an afternoon conference call with House members said, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) at one point pressed the administration officials on the fate of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium.
According to two people granted anonymity to disclose the private remarks, Witkoff and Rubio repeated assurances the administration has privately made to select lawmakers in prior briefings — that the goal is to negotiate a final deal that would prohibit Iran from keeping its highly enriched uranium.
The memorandum of understanding Trump signed earlier this month, they said, was meant to launch those negotiations. Witkoff, the people said, added that the technical team involved in that part of the talks was traveling from Switzerland to Qatar, where talks between the U.S. and Iran are set to happen Tuesday.
Democrats, meanwhile, pushed the administration for more details on what financial benefits Iran could reap under the memorandum — including proceeds from previously sanctioned oil sales.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) went back and forth with Rubio and Witkoff over the lifting of the oil sanctions, two other people granted anonymity on the House call said. The officials eventually cut off the conversation and ended the call.
At another point, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) raised concerns about Witkoff’s business interests in the Middle East as he’s negotiating with Iran, prompting a sharp defense from Rubio, those people said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer asked Rubio and Witkoff about the oil sanctions during a separate all-senators call Monday, saying in a statement afterward that they “confirmed to me that Iran will reap billions in oil revenue while retaining dangerous leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.”
“If this is the administration’s defense behind closed doors, Secretary Rubio should make it under oath, in public, before the Foreign Relations Committee,” Schumer added, calling the briefing “delayed, deficient, and devoid of details.”
An administration official granted anonymity to speak candidly countered on Schumer’s characterization, noting that he had previously gotten a briefing of the deal as part of a group of top leaders engaged on national security matters. Schumer, the official said, had the opportunity to ask multiple follow-up questions on the Senate call.
A separate group of White House officials briefed top congressional leaders and key committee chairs in a classified briefing in the Capitol later Monday.
The administration has faced bipartisan skepticism over multiple provisions of the memorandum of understanding — particularly the lifting of oil sanctions and a $300 billion reconstruction fund that many Senate Republicans fear will help fuel Iran’s military and regional proxies.
Rubio and Witkoff sought to ease concerns about the slow reopening of the Strait of Hormuz — the critical trade route whose closure has sparked higher fuel and fertilizer costs. Both officials said more mine removal is required, and Witkoff indicated that Iran broke the terms of the Trump-signed deal by launching a drone attack on a passing ship over the weekend.
They also sought to assure lawmakers that Iran has received no money under the memorandum — especially not directly from American sources. Administration officials have previously pledged in smaller briefings that the reconstruction fund won’t include U.S. funds.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) called the Senate briefing a “productive conversation” but said “much of what I heard today is similar to what I heard last week” during a dinner at Vice President JD Vance’s residence.
The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed allegations of misconduct levied against Sen. Ruben Gallego, who stood accused by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of “campaign finance violations and inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature.”
The charges came following the resignation of the Arizona Democrat’s longtime friend, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who was forced to step down amid accusations of serious sexual misconduct. Luna, a Florida Republican, sought to implicate Gallego by claiming in an interview on CBS that a woman would come forward about an “incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time and the event was sexual in nature allegedly.”
But in a letter to Gallego sent Monday — which he shared in a public news release — the notoriously inactive Ethics Committee cited Gallego’s “prompt contact with the Committee following media reports of the allegations and appreciated your full cooperation with the Committee throughout the investigation.”
Gallego has maintained he was unaware of the allegations against Swalwell and said in a statement he was a victim of “right-wing conspiracies peddled by far-right activists like Anna Paulina Luna, the White House, and their allies.”
He continued, “I look forward to an apology from Rep. Luna for weaponizing the ethics process while refusing to investigate historic corruption that’s making life harder for families.”
Luna, in a post on X, defended her referral to the Senate Ethics Committee.
“The good news about DC is everyone talks, and eventually the reporters come forward with your texts,” Luna wrote on social media. “Do yourself a favor and keep raising for your legal defense fund. Once a creep always a creep, and you’re gonna need it.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s state. She represents Florida.
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