Always Watchful: Political Context and Congressional Oversight through the Government Accountability Office

Abstract

Oversight of the executive branch is one of Congress’s most critical functions. It is meant to ensure accountability, consistency, and fairness in the implementation of programs by the federal bureaucracy. Much previous scholarship has argued that oversight is more common when Congress and the White House are controlled by different parties. However, much of this research has focused principally on committee hearings, and other tools of oversight have received less attention. One such tool is the Government Accountability Office (GAO). I test competing theories of GAO usage: one which argues that GAO reports are simply another tool of oversight, like hearings, and tend to follow similar patterns and thus are more common in conditions of divided government. The other theory argues that the GAO, because of its commitment to providing useful, nonpartisan information, is more likely to be used when legislative and presidential priorities are aligned. Leveraging reports from the GAO between 1995 and 2022, I find support for the latter proposition, at least in the modern Congress. There is evidence that Congress changes its methods of oversight in response to political incentives, but oversight continues regardless.