After a bruising political season, the conversation in Washington is starting to shift from campaigning to governing—or, more precisely, to oversight. Polls suggest that Democrats are in a strong position to reclaim the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, and if that happens, the party’s lawmakers have made no secret of what they intend to do first: investigate the Trump administration. They want answers about everything from federal spending to the inner workings of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE. It sounds straightforward. In theory, a Congress with subpoena power, investigative committees, and a watchdog agency at its disposal should be able to demand documents, call witnesses, and get to the bottom of things. But the reality is a lot messier. Even before the new Congress takes its seats, a new report from the Government Accountability Office has made it painfully clear that the Trump administration is not exactly eager to cooperate with oversight—and that lawmakers, even with majorities in both chambers, may find themselves locked out of basic information about what the federal government is actually doing.
The report, released in late September, is titled “DOGE: Congress and the Public Lack Assurance That Systems and Data Were Protected at Multiple Agencies.” That title is a mouthful, but the message is simple: when it came to DOGE’s access to sensitive government systems and information, several executive branch agencies simply refused to give investigators the full picture. The GAO, which serves as Congress’s primary investigative arm, tried to look into how DOGE was operating across a handful of federal agencies. What it found was a pattern of resistance. Agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Education, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Small Business Administration all, in one way or another, failed to cooperate fully with the investigation. Some refused to provide information. Others dragged their feet. And at least one—the CFPB—went on the offensive. That agency, which DOGE and the Trump administration hollowed out in the early months of the president’s second term, sent the GAO a letter accusing investigators of bias and alleging that the report itself was “misleading.” It’s a striking move: rather than engaging with the substance of the investigation, the agency being scrutinized tried to discredit the people doing the scrutinizing. For anyone who has followed the Trump administration’s relationship with oversight, it wasn’t a huge surprise. But it underscored just how difficult the next few years could be for Democrats who want answers.
To understand why this matters, it helps to understand the GAO’s role. The Government Accountability Office is not a partisan hit squad. It’s an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress and produces reports and recommendations on how the federal government is functioning. Its work is often requested by lawmakers from both parties, and it has a reputation for careful, methodical, and unglamorous analysis. The GAO doesn’t have the power to enforce laws, and it can’t prosecute anyone. It can’t drag an agency head into court for contempt, and it can’t put anyone in handcuffs. What it can do is ask for information, review documents, audit programs, and report its findings to Congress and the public. Federal agencies are legally required to cooperate with GAO requests for information and auditing. But here’s the catch: the GAO has no real way to force them. If an agency decides to stonewall, the GAO’s main options are to note the refusal in its report and move on, or to ask Congress to step in. That’s a bit like a teacher who can assign a paper but can’t actually make a student turn it in. The teacher can write a note to the principal, but the student is still going to avoid the assignment if they want to. In this case, the principal is Congress, and Congress—at least the current one—has shown little appetite for forcing the issue. Even if Democrats take control of both chambers, they’ll have to figure out what to do with an administration that seems willing to ignore the law, or at least stretch it beyond recognition, when it comes to oversight.
The GAO’s report is just the latest example of a broader trend. Over the past year and a half, the agency has experienced what its spokesperson, Sarah Kaczmarek, described as “increased challenges in obtaining information from agencies.” That’s a polite, bureaucratic way of saying that agencies are becoming more resistant to oversight. When the GAO tries to do its job, it is often met with delays, refusals, and legal pushback. The agencies involved in the DOGE report didn’t all respond the same way, but they all made the same point in different forms: they weren’t going to make this easy. The CFPB’s response was perhaps the most aggressive—accusing the GAO of bias and calling the report misleading—but it wasn’t the only one. A Democratic congressional aide who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity confirmed that the pattern was real: across multiple agencies, the GAO was not getting the cooperation it needed. This is not just a procedural inconvenience. It has real consequences. The entire point of the GAO is to provide Congress and the public with assurance that federal programs, systems, and information are being managed properly and protected. If agencies can simply refuse to hand over information, that assurance evaporates. You can’t know whether something is being handled safely if the people doing the handling won’t let you look inside. And you can’t hold anyone accountable if the basic facts are kept hidden. The report’s title gets it right: there is no assurance, because there is no access.
So what can Congress actually do about it? That’s the question Emily Berman, a law professor at the University of Houston, has been thinking about. Her answer is a little grim. “In a world where there is no shame, it’s hard to think of what Congress can do that doesn’t involve some coercion of some kind,” she says. “Like withholding money or going to court.” That’s the crux of the problem. Traditionally, congressional oversight has relied on a certain amount of cooperation and a shared understanding that public officials are accountable to the people. When a congressional committee issues a subpoena or the GAO requests documents, the expectation is that the executive branch will comply, not because it wants to, but because it respects the institutional balance of power. The Trump administration, however, has repeatedly shown that it doesn’t feel that same sense of obligation. It has ignored subpoenas, withheld documents, and attacked the motives of investigators. In such an environment, the usual tools of oversight lose their power. Public embarrassment doesn’t work if the administration doesn’t care about public opinion. A bad report doesn’t work if the administration can simply dismiss it as biased or misleading. Even a legal victory doesn’t mean much if the administration drags the process out long enough to run out the clock. That leaves Congress with two real options, as Berman notes: try to take away funding, or try to force compliance through the courts. Both are slow, messy, and politically risky. Withholding money can backfire if it means cutting programs that people depend on. Going to court can take years, and the Trump administration has shown a willingness to fight every step of the way. In the meantime, the information that Congress and the public need remains locked away.
That’s what makes the GAO’s latest report so significant. It’s not just a dry document about data access and administrative procedures. It’s a warning about the state of American governance. When the government’s own watchdog can’t get basic information from federal agencies, something has gone seriously wrong. The GAO was designed to be a check on executive power, an independent source of truth that Congress could rely on to understand what the bureaucracy was doing. But if agencies can refuse to cooperate without consequence, then the GAO becomes little more than a suggestion box. Its reports can be ignored, its investigators can be attacked, and its findings can be buried in the shuffle of an administration that would rather fight than explain. The report on DOGE and its access to sensitive systems is not the end of the story. It’s the beginning. If Democrats do take back the House and Senate, they will face a daunting challenge: trying to investigate an administration that has no intention of making the job easy. They can issue subpoenas. They can hold hearings. They can demand answers. But unless they are willing to use the bluntest tools available—withholding funds, going to court, and forcing the issue at every turn—they may find themselves in the same position as the GAO: frustrated, blocked, and unable to give the public the assurance it deserves. The stakes are high, and the path forward is unclear. But one thing is certain: the next few years will be a test not just of the Trump administration, but of whether Congress is still capable of doing its job.
