Note: Since the 15-year term of the current head of Government Accountability Office (GAO) ends on December 29, National Taxpayers Union (NTU) and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) prepared this short guide to walk journalists through the rarely-used appointment process to select the next GAO Comptroller General.
The Government Accountability Office is the legislative branch agency that audits, investigates, and evaluates federal programs to help Congress ensure transparency and accountability across the federal government.
As the 15-year term of the current Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) nears its end, attention turns to the process that will determine the agency’s next leader. Under federal law, the Comptroller General may not be reappointed, meaning that Congress and the President must now select a successor who can carry forward GAO’s vital mission.
Because this appointment occurs so infrequently, few offices have firsthand experience with the statutory process. This joint brief provides a clear, factual overview to support an informed and bipartisan selection effort.
The Role of the Comptroller General and GAO
The Comptroller General serves as head of GAO, Congress’s independent watchdog and principal investigatory arm for overseeing the Executive Branch. GAO conducts thorough and independent oversight and audits across federal government operations, producing hundreds of fact-based recommendations and billions of dollars in taxpayer savings each fiscal year. GAO not only identifies vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, and abuse, but also analyzes federal spending and performance to improve effectiveness and efficiency—reporting to Congress both on programs at “high risk” for these issues and identifying areas of duplication, overlap, and fragmentation across federal agencies.
As a watchdog over the entire federal government, GAO provides comprehensive analyses of government operations, allowing Congress to more readily and effectively address both agency-specific issues and governmentwide trends. Lawmakers from across the aisle and from both chambers rely on GAO to investigate emerging concerns, evaluate federal programs, and provide expertise on issues of common interest. Over a 20-year period from 2001 to 2021, GAO’s work resulted in more than $1.2 trillion in financial benefit to the federal government.
GAO’s independence is critical to its ability to function as a non-partisan watchdog. As the current Comptroller General’s 15-year term for GAO’s concludes this December, members of Congress must initiate the statutory appointment process and the Senate must carefully evaluate any nominee to maintain GAO’s credibility, independence, and effectiveness.
The Comptroller General Appointment Process
The Comptroller General appointment process, established in the General Accounting Office Act of 1980 and codified at 31 U.S.C. § 703, was designed to safeguard GAO’s independence as Congress’s non-partisan watchdog. It requires bipartisan, bicameral, and interbranch cooperation to select a candidate with both the technical and personal qualifications and experience needed to lead GAO’s critical mission.
When the Comptroller General’s office becomes vacant, a 10-member commission convenes to recommend at least three candidates to the President. That commission is composed of the Speaker of the House, President pro tempore of the Senate, the House and Senate majority and minority leaders, and the chairs and ranking members of the House Oversight and Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committees.
The commission recommends at least three names to the President, who may also request additional names for consideration. The President then nominates an individual from the commission’s list who is subject to Senate confirmation for a 15-year term. Once confirmed, the Comptroller General can be removed only by Congress, as the Supreme Court has made clear.
All three Presidents who have nominated a new Comptroller General under this statutory framework (Reagan, Clinton, and Obama) adhered to this process. In each case, the President waited for the commission’s recommendations, and ultimately selected a nominee from the list provided, underscoring the importance of interbranch, interparty collaboration to effectively fill the office.
The Importance of the Congressional Commission
Interbranch, interparty collaboration is precisely the purpose of the commission process. It requires Democrats and Republicans to identify nominees who are acceptable to both parties, filtering out ideological choices and elevating candidates with leadership and oversight experience, technical qualifications, and a reputation of integrity and fair-dealing with all. That is precisely the type of Comptroller General necessary to preserve GAO’s role as Congress’s independent, non-partisan watchdog and auditor.
Presidents have respected this process even when the commission did not operate smoothly. Notably, during the Clinton and Obama Administrations, congressional Democrats and Republicans clashed over which names to recommend. During the Clinton Administration, each party sent separate lists of nominees to the President, who ultimately selected David Walker from the Republican list. During the Obama Administration, commission Democrats submitted a list of recommendations without agreement from Republicans, who argued that one of the individuals included by Democrats was too ideological and partisan; President Obama ultimately nominated Gene Dodaro—a career civil servant with GAO—from the list instead.
Despite the challenges presented by these two congressional commissions, Presidents Clinton and Obama both took steps to respect and preserve the integrity of the process. Both Presidents waited until recommendations had been delivered to them before making a nomination. And both made gestures at bipartisanship: Clinton by nominating an individual from the Republican list, and Obama by declining to nominate the individual to whom Republicans had fiercely objected.
Presidential adherence to the norms of the commission process, even in the face of congressional dysfunction, has helped ensure that the process achieves its intended result. Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Obama all nominated widely respected individuals with a wealth of accounting and auditing experience, including in the executive branch where all three nominees served in both Democratic and Republican administrations prior to becoming Comptroller General. The process may have been imperfect, but in all three instances, it yielded a highly-qualified, depoliticized nominee. That is precisely the type of leadership that GAO requires.