The House Appropriations Committee’s Legislative Brach Subcommittee voted on Monday night to approve a $415 million budget for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for fiscal year (FY) 2026 – marking a 48 percent year-over-year cut from GAO’s budget of $811.9 million in FY2025.
The subcommittee voted in favor of that draconian cut by a vote of 6-4, against vociferous opposition from Democratic members of the panel who said the funding cut reflects anger from the White House over GAO’s ongoing role in investigating whether the administration can withhold spending for congressionally approved programs.
GAO’s budget is included within the larger annual budget for the legislative branch. The Legislative Branch Appropriations Act approved by the subcommittee on Monday night comes in at $6.7 billion for FY2026, or $51 million less than the FY2025 enacted level. The budget includes a 10 percent funding increase for the U.S. Capitol Police, and a 5 percent overall spending bump for the House of Representatives.
GAO Too Liberal?
The stated sticking point for the House Appropriations Committee’s Republican leadership is its claim that GAO – which works for Congress and historically has garnered strong support from both sides of the aisle – has become too “liberal” in its work.
A description of the appropriations bill provided by Republican committee leadership says the steep GAO budget cut is aimed at “redirecting the Government Accountability Office’s efforts to be reflective of congressional priorities and cutting funding to curtail the agency’s self-directed, liberal initiatives.”
The same legislative description says the bill maintains “investments to ensure the Congress can continue its work to support President Trump’s legislative priorities.”
GAO operates as the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, with the stated mission of acting as “independent, non-partisan agency” that “examines how taxpayer dollars are spent and provides Congress and federal agencies with objective, non-partisan, fact-based information to help the government save money and work more efficiently.”
In practice, GAO fields requests for information and reports from all members of Congress, and requirements for its reporting are often written into legislation.
In testimony to the House Appropriations Legislative Subcommittee in April, GAO’s director Gene Dodaro said he was looking for a15 percent year-over-year budget increase for FY2026 – to $933 million – and planned to use the higher funding to restore depleted agency staffing levels and to pursue several major lines of work including in the areas of science and technology, fraud prevention, and cybersecurity.
Dodaro told the subcommittee that GAO’s work yielded $67.5 billion in “financial benefits” to the government in FY2024, and that “our average return on investment for the past 6 years is $123 for every dollar invested in GAO.”
Democrats Point to White House Influence
During a markup session on Monday night, Republicans on the subcommittee had little to say about the GAO budget cut, while Democratic members put the reductions front and center in their objections to the legislation.
Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., who is ranking member of the subcommittee, criticized the bill for its “unnecessary and divisive riders,” and the “whopping” cut to the GAO’s budget.
“The party who has prioritized waste, fraud and abuse has cut the GAO, the government’s premier auditor and watchdog, by almost 50 percent,” the congressman said. “According to Republicans, these cuts are necessary to curtail the agency’s self-directed liberal initiatives. I disagree.”
GAO, he said, is “responsible for identifying waste and abuse within agencies” and “last year alone it found $162 billion in improper payments. It works on IT and infrastructure- related projects and investments [and] stopping this will would result in inefficiency and increase security risk across the board.”
“This reduction is a knee-jerk reaction to the GAO’s nearly 40 open investigations into whether the White House is illegally withholding money Congress previously appropriated,” he said.
“The majority decision to cut funding is ill intended,” he continued. “With this cut, 2,200 jobs will be lost in exchange for cutting about $400 million with this budget cut … Congress will forgo tens of billions of dollars in cost savings that result from GAO work each year.”
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., ranking member of the full Appropriations Committee, reinforced Rep. Espaillat’s contention that the GAO budget cut stems from White House opposition to the agency’s ongoing work to evaluate the legality of decisions by the Trump administration to withhold funding for congressionally approved purposes.
“Since taking office, the Trump administration has stolen funding appropriated by our committee – passed by the House and the Senate and signed into law by the president for programs and services across the Federal government,” she said.
“This bill’s drastic cuts and constraints on the Government Accountability Office and the Library of Congress will inhibit our ability to hold government accountable and root out waste and fraud,” Rep. DeLauro said. GAO’s work, she said, “is an invaluable asset to the American people in ensuring their government is not running afoul of the law.”
“GAO is one of our most valuable tools to achieve better efficiency and effectiveness across the government, so it’s astonishing that for all the talk about finding and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, House Republicans would defund the watchdog that is tasked with precisely that role,” she continued.
“The only plausible explanation is that the majority and the administration to which it is exceedingly loyal is upset that GAO has repeatedly found that the White House is stealing funds away from taxpayers,” she said.
“We as appropriators and as members of Congress cannot tolerate this theft,” she said, adding, “They would defund the institution that alerts us to government malfeasance.”
GAO Versus Federal Funding Freezes
In testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee in February, GAO’s Dodaro said his agency was preparing to potentially take President Donald Trump to court over his efforts to freeze Federal funding for programs that Congress had already approved.
The GAO chief’s remarks came after the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in January declared a freeze on most Federal grant and loan program payments with an aim to defund Federal programs that don’t align with the president’s agenda. OMB quickly rescinded the memo.
Dodaro said GAO was also looking into the legality of pausing these payments, which he said may be a violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. That law restricts a president from cutting funding without the approval of Congress.
“We’ve already sent letters to the administration asking them to explain their legal position to us, and we will be making rulings as to whether or not these issues violated the Impoundment Control Act or not,” Dodaro said during the Feb. 25 hearing.
At that hearing, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told Dodaro that “this is not a time for caution in speaking out” against funding freezes.
“We’re going to make these decisions as fast as possible,” Dodaro told Rep. Khanna. “I fully intend to carry out our responsibilities under the Impoundment Control Act expeditiously and thoroughly.”
“I’ll do it as quickly as I can, but we need to be careful and thorough because the next step for us is to go to court ourselves,” Dodaro added. “Under the Impoundment Control Act, if we say there’s an impoundment – the money’s not released within a certain period of time – we have to go to court.”
When asked by Rep. Khanna if he was prepared to do that, Dodaro said, “Yes, but I need to be prepared and be careful because when I go there, I want to win.”