ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The Trump istration's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has attempted to embed itself in another agency. This time, it's the Government ability Office. The office has refused, but as NPR's Chris Arnold reports, many experts say, rather than try to elbow its way in the door, DOGE should have been asking GAO for help all along.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: For months, DOGE has been strong-arming its way into government agencies, gaining access to sensitive data and helping to fire workers. Doing that at the Government ability Office, that would be way over the line, says David Walker. He used to run the GAO.
DAVID WALKER: The DOGE team needs to read the Constitution again. There are three separate and equal branches of government.
ARNOLD: GAO operates under the legislative branch - in other words, Congress - not the White House.
WALKER: DOGE has zero authority to review GAO's operations.
ARNOLD: Walker's been nominated to positions by both Republican and Democratic presidents, and he says GAO and DOGE supposedly have a very similar mission - to root out waste, fraud and abuse, except, he says, that GAO has been doing that for decades, has a staff of several thousand people and it's really good at it.
WALKER: GAO's like a longstanding professional football team, and DOGE has some very bright people, but it's more like a much smaller pickup football team from MIT. It's like intramurals, OK?
ARNOLD: Over the past 15 years, GAO says its recommendations have resulted in $725 billion in savings and revenue increases. It just came up with an updated list of proposals. It says that could save another hundred billion or more. Just one example - it's been studying a space-based laser communication system that the Defense Department's deg. GAO says it's found a tweak to the program that could save hundreds of millions of dollars.
The White House didn't respond to NPR's request for comment but has defended DOGE for finding waste, fraud and abuse. And the current head of the GAO recently said that DOGE lately has been engaging more with GAO about some of its recommendations. Still, David Walker says poor planning and inadequate coordination with Congress have hamstrung DOGE.
WALKER: DOGE way overpromised on savings, originally promising 2 trillion. They now claim that they've saved about 170 billion. But in reality, I think the real savings is maybe one-tenth to one-fifth of what they claim because only Congress can cut spending.
ARNOLD: Walker says, so far, DOGE has mostly been targeting programs that the Trump istration just doesn't like and indiscriminately firing people. Linda Bilmes is a government efficiency expert at the Harvard Kennedy School. She says that DOGE could have learned a lot from GAO.
LINDA BILMES: One of the real tragedies of the whole DOGE effort is that they just ignored this kind of expertise and they didn't tap into the knowledge base of the people already working in government.
ARNOLD: She says the chance to work alongside Elon Musk to help reform government lured in a lot of very talented young people. Some of them were students of hers at Harvard.
BILMES: I know firsthand some of the individuals who work for Elon Musk, but they were not leveraged in of their own talents. They were put in charge of a website that they had no idea what it was and asked to fire people, and they really were put into positions in which they were entirely unsuited for.
ARNOLD: Meanwhile, as far as DOGE trying to embed itself in GAO, there's another thorny issue there. GAO currently has dozens of investigations underway into whether the Trump istration improperly froze funding that was already allocated by Congress. David Walker again.
WALKER: There clearly is a conflict of interest there. DOGE shouldn't be anywhere close to looking at what GAO's doing in connection with those activities.
ARNOLD: The current head of GAO recently told Congress that the Trump istration was not immediately responsive to its investigations.
Chris Arnold, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAYWRD'S "SERENDIPITY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
