Government Accountability Office

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    The Watchdog Lost Its Own Paper Trail

    ByHugh Jass

    I have exhumed many documents in my career, but few arrived with the solemnity of the GAO inspector general report asking where GAO’s own modernization explanation went. The Government Accountability Office, famous for examining everyone else’s paperwork, spent roughly $1 million developing a five-year IT modernization roadmap projected at about $29 million. Less than 18 months later, that roadmap became an ongoing strategy, and the rationale for the change was not readily documented. Exhibit A had a pulse, then misplaced its identification.

    The OIG found two related problems: GAO lacked a documented rationale for changing the strategy, and the initiative’s costs were not easily reportable. This is not a finding of theft or fraud. It is something more bureaucratically haunting: an institution making a major technology decision and leaving behind no dependable record explaining who decided what, when, or how much the whole thing was costing. Somewhere, a filing cabinet is staring into the middle distance.

    That contradiction matters because oversight is not a magic spell. An agency can possess excellent auditors, patriotic letterhead, and enough acronyms to summon a federal weather system, yet still lose the paperwork proving it understood its own pivot. The five-year plan was a plan; then it was an ongoing strategy; the cost picture remained difficult to assemble. The document coughed, and the room had to pretend that was a project-management methodology.

    To GAO’s credit, the agency agreed to the OIG’s two recommendations. Those recommendations call for stronger records supporting major strategy decisions and better cost tracking for the modernization effort. That response is the useful part of the story: accountability is not the absence of mistakes. It is the willingness to leave a trail sturdy enough for the next person to follow without carrying a lantern and a subpoena.

    The public does not need institutions to perform confidence. It needs them to show their work, especially when public money is involved and the plan changes before the ink has emotionally recovered. The ultimate missing government document is the one explaining why the government changed the plan. The watchdog did not get caught stealing the evidence; it simply misplaced the paperwork proving it knew what it was doing.

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    The Navy’s Submarines Are Dockside Billionaires

    ByHugh Jass

    I opened the Government Accountability Office report expecting naval gravitas and found a submarine behaving like a very expensive office chair: present, imposing, and unavailable when someone needs it. GAO found that maintenance and decommissioning delays kept attack submarines from operational service, producing more than 15,000 lost operational days and about $3.4 billion in costs during fiscal years 2016 through 2025. The document coughed politely, then pointed toward the dry dock.

    GAO’s method was not a sailor’s rumor passed around near the vending machines. The auditors reviewed the ten-year period from fiscal 2016 through fiscal 2025, examined inactive time and associated costs, and assessed what happens if the bottlenecks continue. Their projection: more than 14,000 additional inactive idle days and roughly $3.1 billion in costs for 15 submarines through fiscal year 2030. That is a trend line with a security clearance and the posture of a man who has never once been asked to move his car.

    The target here is not the submarines, the crews, or the technical work required to maintain nuclear-powered vessels. GAO did not say these boats were useless, abandoned, or unsafe. The documented problem is more bureaucratic and therefore more durable: maintenance and retirement queues are preventing expensive strategic assets from generating the operational time taxpayers were promised. Procurement fog has created the rare achievement of preserving the expense of readiness while delaying readiness itself.

    The Navy verbally agreed with two GAO recommendations, but did not provide written comments. That is not proof that a fix has arrived; it is institutional fog wearing a visitor badge. Somewhere, a recommendation is being discussed, scheduled for coordination, and perhaps placed in a folder marked “action items,” while sailors and reactors wait for a dry dock and the budget continues its orderly march.

    For ordinary people, readiness is not measured by how impressive a submarine looks in a budget document. It is measured by whether the thing can perform its assigned mission when called upon. The fleet has achieved stealth by disappearing from the operational schedule while remaining fully visible on the bill. Hugh Jass Serious hereby certifies the Navy’s most reliable mission: keeping boats, crews, and taxpayers waiting while the paperwork remains at sea.

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    OPM Cut 35% of Its Staff and Kept Adding Responsibilities

    ByHugh Jass

    The federal government has apparently labeled OPM’s 35 percent workforce reduction “efficiency,” a word that entered the records room, looked around, and refused to identify the remaining personnel. According to a July 20 Government Accountability Office report, the Office of Personnel Management eliminated 10 offices while cutting its headcount. The package was delivered to the agency responsible for human resources after many of the humans had been removed from the premises.

    GAO also found that 57 percent of departing OPM employees had at least 11 years of service. That is not merely a staffing change; that is institutional memory wheeling its suitcase toward the exit. These were the people who knew which form was obsolete, which process had three hidden steps, and which drawer contained the original drawer map.

    Meanwhile, the report describes OPM contemplating additional responsibilities, including handling more employee appeals and expanding work involving artificial intelligence and information-technology modernization. The contradiction is not that modernization exists. Modernization is useful. The contradiction is asking a smaller workforce to carry a larger filing cabinet while describing the missing hands as a strategic improvement.

    As Hugh Jass, I examined the paperwork under a lamp normally reserved for suspicious procurement documents. Exhibit A had a pulse: fewer employees, fewer offices, and a greater menu of assignments. No one should claim the report proves that these cuts directly caused a particular service failure. But it does document a capacity problem hiding in plain bureaucratic language. “Do more with less” is often just a management memo discovering arithmetic for the first time.

    The missing personnel have now been filed under “strategic efficiency,” a classification broad enough to contain an empty desk, a delayed appeal, and an entire generation of procedural knowledge. Ordinary federal workers and the people waiting on those systems deserve better than a government that treats experience as clutter and responsibility as an expandable field. Somewhere in OPM, a form is still looking for the staff member who knows where to send it.

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    GAO’s DOGE Audit Hits a Bureaucratic Wall: Agencies Refuse to Hand Over Screenshots

    ByHugh Jass

    The Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) recent audit of DOGE’s access to sensitive federal databases has hit a peculiarly bureaucratic snag. Imagine the disappointment, not to mention the comedy, of a diligent watchdog smacking headfirst into a wall of ‘no screenshots allowed’ signs. The Washington Post reported today on just such an absurdity, with various agencies, led by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), stonewalling GAO’s requests for basic walkthroughs and screenshots. It’s almost as if someone thought a simple screenshot had the heft of a state secret.

    The GAO’s intent appears straightforward enough: to understand how DOGE, a protocol known for its humor-infused origin, accessed certain sensitive information. The audit was meant to ensure proper oversight, yet this undertaking has found its pace slowed by missing pixels. Who would have thought the picture would be so hard to capture?

    According to emails obtained in the probe, HHS has explicitly refused to turn over the requested materials, positioning them as mundane yet mysteriously off-limits. Some of these documents might feel lighter than air but have somehow acquired the gravity of classified missives nobody intended to read by human eyes.

    The GAO, unfazed and possibly rolling its eyes, has reaffirmed its dedication to pursuing thorough audits. Yet one can almost hear the filing cabinet clearing its throat as it firmly declines the request for a digital peek behind the curtains. Meanwhile, Representative Bobby Scott has raised the alarm about potential chasms in oversight, as the refusal starkly contrasts with the GAO’s intended litigation match-up.

    Here lies the larger quandary: if an oversight body can’t lay eyes on something as pedestrian as a screenshot, what hope does the public have in gleaning any understanding of data handling within federal bounds? The stakes, though comedic, reflect a serious underlying issue of transparency and accountability.

    In the end, this tale of a watchdog rendered toothless by red tape illustrates the absurd fineries of bureaucratic rigor. The GAO wants to take a look, but it seems the sheer weight of a bureaucratic eyelid remains closed. One can only hope this opener to oversight tomfoolery gets a page refresh soon.

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