Congress
Time for Congress to find a new top watchdog for Trump to nominate
For the first time in nearly two decades, Congress is on the hunt for a new boss at the federal government’s top watchdog agency.
With the retirement of comptroller general Gene Dodaro, longtime Government Accountability Office employee Orice Williams Brown is stepping in to lead the more-than-3,000-person agency in an acting capacity.
Congressional leaders are now supposed to recommend candidates for President Donald Trump to nominate for a 15-year term. If confirmed by the Senate, that person will lead the agency as it works through dozens of investigations into whether the Trump administration broke the law throughout 2025 by withholding billions of dollars Congress previously approved.
“We’re going to look for someone who’s honest,” Sen. Rand Paul said in an interview. “I think it would be a mistake to get somebody who’s been real active in political processes.”
As chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Kentucky Republican is by law granted a seat on the bipartisan panel of 10 lawmakers tasked with recommending at least three potential replacements for Trump to consider nominating.
Paul and many other top Republicans on Capitol Hill are fans of GAO. But this past year, other conservatives and Trump’s senior advisers have openly ridiculed the legislative branch office charged with auditing federal agencies, aiding lawmakers in carrying out their constitutional duties and challenging White House actions that encroach on Congress’ power.
In recent months, the comptroller general has also been under pressure to take legal action against the Trump administration for withholding federal cash — especially after the Supreme Court appeared to imply this fall that the GAO head is the only plaintiff with standing to sue under decades-old impoundment law.
The next comptroller general must be “willing to call balls and strikes regardless of which party occupies the White House,” Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, who will be on the panel to recommend candidates, said in a floor speech this month.
Dodaro leaves “a legacy of tremendous credibility, integrity and independence,” said Peters, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
From the Senate, the bipartisan panel will also include Majority Leader John Thune, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the president pro tempore.
In the House, the roster will include Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, House Oversight and Government Reform Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the Oversight panel’s top Democrat.
Jeffries said this month that he will be talking to his caucus about what kind of candidates to support.
Comer, meanwhile, used the GOP buzzphrase “waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement” to describe the kind of oversight work he wants the next GAO head to focus on.
“We want them to be aggressive, and we want them to work closely with us on identifying — not just problems, but solutions to the problem,” he said in an interview.
Comer hailed Dodaro in a tribute speech on the House floor this month as “deeply respected across the government and the oversight community for his integrity, candor and dedication.”
If history is any indication, it could take a while to seat a long-term replacement.
Dodaro served as acting director for more than two years before the Senate confirmed him to the post in 2010. There was also a two-year gap before his predecessor, David Walker, was confirmed.
Paul in a recent interview indicated there has been some discussion about launching the bipartisan selection commission, but “I don’t know much more than that.”
Top appropriators on Capitol Hill are seeking to tighten limits around how much money DHS can shift between accounts as they finalize funding bills ahead of the Jan. 30 shutdown deadline.
Rep. Mark Amodei, the Nevada Republican who chairs the DHS funding panel, told reporters Tuesday night that House and Senate appropriators are crafting their spending measure to make it “harder to make the money mobile.” The effort comes as the Trump administration has spent the past year testing the limits of its power to disregard congressional intent and reprogram billions of dollars between accounts.
“We did a bunch of reprogramming,” Amodei said of Republicans in the White House. “It’s like, hey, that’s bullshit.”
To limit the Trump administration’s ability to shift cash, appropriators plan to include tables within the bill that show exactly which accounts should be funded and lower the percentages of cash that can be used for other purposes, Amodei continued.
Appropriators have briefed President Donald Trump’s budget office on the funding bill they hope to pass and have taken OMB’s input into account, Amodei said. Still, he acknowledged that some Trump administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, will not be fond of new restrictions on moving around cash.
“Now I know that the secretary doesn’t like that,” Amodei said. “And it’s like, well, we’ve all got our unlike departments. And so welcome to the club.”
He also divulged that the funding bill will provide enough cash for DHS to keep 44,500 immigrants in detention facilities at any given time. Appropriators will be tracking detention capacity every month and expect the Trump administration to fill that “detention bed” capacity, he added.
“They better, by God, be full,” said Amodei.
Amodei is in the midst of final negotiations with senior Senate appropriators on the DHS funding bill. “We’re real close,” he said. “We want to be able to publish the bill this week.”
The new Republican-led panel tasked with investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack will hold its first hearing next week, Rep. Barry Loudermilk said in an interview Tuesday — the five-year anniversary of the event.
The Georgia Republican, who is the chair of the select subcommittee, said his panel was still ironing out its list of witnesses, but he anticipated the focus would be the pipe bombs left at the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters the day before the riots at the Capitol.
“It’s gonna be sometime next week,” Loudermilk said. “We’re gonna be really looking at the pipe bomb and the FBI’s investigation — previous investigation. Why did it take five years?”
News of the hearing that would look at the events of that day through the lens of security failures rather than attempts by President Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election was the culmination of a daylong campaign from Republicans to offer an alternative memory of the Capitol attack.
The White House published a website offering a largely false narrative of what unfolded at the Capitol five years ago — one that blamed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and forcefully denied Trump’s role in inciting the violence. Democrats and Republicans also fought over the fate of a commemorative plaque mandated by Congress to honor those who protected the Capitol on Jan. 6, with Speaker Mike Johnson maintaining the project was untenable.
Loudermilk said he had not spoken to Johnson about the memorial tablet and hasn’t been following the controversy around it but suggested he wasn’t opposed to its display — something of a break with House GOP leadership have sought to either bury the matter or denigrate the effort.
“I don’t have problem putting it up. I think you need to honor the police,” he said. “I mean, the rank and file police, they were just trying to do their job.”
Speaker Mike Johnson Tuesday evening swatted down the idea of any U.S. military action to take over Greenland, just after the White House said President Donald Trump wanted to acquire the territory and would not take military action off the table.
“No, I don’t think that’s appropriate,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday evening.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Tuesday that “utilizing the U.S. Military is always an option at the Commander in Chief’s disposal.”
The speaker, who said he hadn’t seen the statement, appeared to not believe the White House would make such a comment. Johnson did say he believed “Greenland is viewed by a lot of people as something that would be a strategic positioning for the U.S.”
Johnson said the issue didn’t come up in conversations with Trump earlier Tuesday at the House GOP retreat.
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