From The Washington Post:
Agencies won’t hand over records for an investigation into how DOGE accessed data
Democrats in Congress are raising the alarm as the Trump administration is not handing all its information over to a government watchdog.
Since last spring, the GAO has been looking into how DOGE members accessed sensitive government databases. But the probes have been stymied by federal agencies trying to avoid handing over information.
A GAO attorney emailed officials at the Department of Health and Human Services last month because, while the agency provided much of the documentation that was requested, there were outstanding requests for information that were key to the investigation, including screenshots and a routine walk-through meeting to corroborate details about DOGE’s access to data.
The GAO attorney told the HHS officials that the congressional research arm could discuss how it would protect confidential information as it has with other agencies in the past.
“We believe that any of the options presented to HHS should alleviate your concerns over potential discrepancies between what is produced in litigation and provided to GAO,” the GAO attorney wrote to HHS officials.
An HHS attorney responded nearly two hours later that their “position has not changed and we would like to work to close out the engagement.”
The struggle between administration officials and the government watchdog has held up the investigative process as the GAO has sought to get records and other information about how Musk’s team of technologists gained access to the government’s most guarded data in the early months of the second Trump term, according to email exchanges reviewed by The Washington Post and six staffers at three House committees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details about the GAO’s work. The agencies’ refusals to provide information have raised concerns among Democrats about how thorough the ongoing reviews of DOGE will be, the staffers said.
Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (Virginia), the ranking Democrat on the Education and the Workforce Committee, demanded HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cooperate with the GAO probe and raised concerns about HHS’s explanation for noncooperation, which Scott wrote in a letter to Kennedy on Sunday “stemmed from concerns that information … provided to GAO may not be the same as those provided in litigation.”
GAO spokeswoman Sarah Kaczmarek said the office is pushing to overcome barriers to information access.
“GAO is committed to fulfilling our statutory audit responsibilities and is actively engaged with HHS and congressional committees to resolve outstanding access issues,” Kaczmarek said in a statement. “Timely cooperation from [a] federal agency is essential to ensuring Congress has the information it needs to conduct effective oversight.”
GAO, the independent, nonpartisan congressional watchdog, is tasked with investigating and auditing federal programs to ensure money is spent as Congress intended and root out waste, fraud and abuse.
The Trump administration and the GAO have repeatedly clashed in the past year. Administration officials accused the GAO of partisan influence, and the Office of Management and Budget has stonewalled requests from the GAO that it considered to be “invasive.” The White House sent a directive to agencies last month that government transparency experts said could reduce agencies’ use of GAO recommendations. OMB Director Russell Vought has had GAO in his crosshairs, questioning whether it should exist at all.
So far, the GAO has released two reports about DOGE’s access to government data: Last month, the GAO said it had found the Treasury Department gave a DOGE employee access to the government’s payment systems early last year without following its own security rules. Another report concluded that DOGE didn’t access National Labor Relations Board IT systems, but the review only covered a limited window of time. (The GAO said it didn’t want to overlap with an ongoing investigation by the NLRB’s inspector general that is looking into a whistleblower’s allegations of improper access.)
Other agencies have either not responded to GAO’s requests about DOGE information, slow-walked sharing records or told the GAO that they believed they didn’t have the authority to answer questions because the probes have stemmed from Democrats’ requests rather than from the Republican chairs of congressional committees, according to the staffers and emails. The GAO does have the legal authority to carry out a broad range of work at the request of lawmakers from both parties
The GAO also has the power to request most information from agencies, and if agencies refuse — though they rarely have in the past — the GAO could go to court, said Henry Wray, a former associate general counsel and ethics counselor for the GAO.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a time until this Trump administration where an administration was anything like this hostile to GAO,” Wray said. “It’s just a whole different experience for GAO.”
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