Government Executive - Oversight

HUD’s staffing cuts hurt certain housing services, watchdog finds

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:45:51 -0400

Updated at 6:35 p.m. ET Oct. 15

Grantees, property managers and national housing organizations reported to government auditors that it has become more difficult to work with the Housing and Urban Development Department following last year’s staff cuts, according to a watchdog report that was publicly released on Wednesday.

The Government Accountability Office found that HUD’s workforce decreased by about 29% between December 2024 and 2025, going down to roughly 6,300 workers. Most staffers left under the deferred resignation program, and 41% of the departing employees had more than 20 years of department service.

Based on interviews with representatives from 20 housing stakeholder organizations, auditors determined that last year’s downsizing made it harder for these groups to get information from HUD.

For example:

All Fair Housing Initiatives Program grantees and agencies that GAO interviewed reported that they were either unsure who their HUD grant administrator was or had less communication with a newly assigned official.
One organization shared that “questions that previously received same-day responses could take up to 30 days.”
A public housing agency said that it could not access the department’s grant and subsidy disbursement system for three months because “it took time to find a HUD employee with the proper administrative rights to the system to grant [the agency’s] new executive director access to the system. During that period, the PHA used reserve funds to cover salaries, utilities and other operating costs but was unable to pay some contractors.”

GAO noted that HUD has announced several proposals to improve efficiency, including updating IT systems, creating a unified grants system and launching a service delivery improvement initiative. But auditors said that the department did not respond to their request to discuss the status of these programs.

“These initiatives may help HUD modernize and improve the delivery of its programs and services,” they wrote. “However, it is too soon to assess their effectiveness or the extent to which they will help HUD achieve its mission.”

In response to a request for comment, HUD said that it "remains laser-focused on delivering the gold standard of service" and has reduced backlogs of civil rights and fair housing cases.

“Under President Trump and Secretary Turner’s leadership, HUD has restored its commitment to efficiency and stewardship," a spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive. "While the Biden administration turned a blind eye to this massive amount of waste and abuse, we are standing up for the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars, so every cent serves our most vulnerable instead of lining the pockets of homeless industrial complex millionaires."

In the spring, the department began moving the majority of its headquarters workforce from a building in Washington, D.C., to a new location in Alexandria, Va. The Trump administration has argued that the relocation will save money and provide HUD workers with a better office building.

The District of Columbia in July filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the move, pointing to the lack of congressional approval and a statutory requirement that HUD be established in the “seat of government.” The filing said that more than 80% of headquarters employees have been reassigned to the Alexandria office.

This story has been updated with a statement from HUD.

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Labor has mostly stopped checking whether federal contractors are following disability rules

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:06:39 -0400

As the Trump administration slashed a Labor Department agency’s workforce and jurisdiction, the office’s enforcement of certain anti-disability discrimination rules that are still on the books was nevertheless weakened by the overhauls, according to a new watchdog report.

Prior to the start of the president’s second term, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs enforced equal opportunity requirements for federal contractors and subcontractors, including Executive Order 11246 (a 1965 anti-discrimination directive), Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act (anti-disability discrimination law) and the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act (veterans employment law).

Agencies in fiscal 2025 spent roughly $793 billion on federal contracts that support the employment of more than one million U.S. workers.

OFCCP used to generally conduct audits to assess contractor compliance with all three measures’ requirements concurrently, but Trump repealed the executive order as part of a broader anti-diversity push. As a result, the agency paused, with respect to anti-disability discrimination requirements, the annual certification of affirmative action programs and associated auditing.

The Government Accountability Office found that this has caused confusion among federal contractors about what rules are still being enforced and could hurt federal contractors with disabilities.

“In the absence of audits related to Section 503, DOL lacks a mechanism for regularly monitoring contractors’ implementation of the policies and practices described in their required affirmative action programs,” auditors wrote. “In turn, OFCCP has less assurance that contractors are complying with Section 503 and supporting the employment of people with disabilities.”

An OFCCP employee told Government Executive in 2025 that possible employee settlements under Section 503 and VEVRAA were being held up by the enforcement pause.

In August, DOL also updated regulations so that contractors no longer have to set a goal of employing 7% of their workforce with people with disabilities or track such progress by requiring employees and applicants to self-identify as having a disability or not.

GAO reported that OFCCP conducted nearly 9,000 contractor audits between fiscal years 2017 and 2025, of which 15.7% uncovered at least one violation of agency regulations.

Following the repeal of EO 11246, OFCCP also downsized its workforce. GAO found that the agency went from nearly 500 full-time employees at the start of fiscal 2025 to fewer than 80 by fiscal 2026 and reduced the number of its field offices from 50 to six.

Additionally, auditors criticized agency officials for not conducting workforce planning to ensure that the retained staffers had the skills needed to perform remaining enforcement activities.

GAO recommended that OFCCP resume certifying contractor affirmative action programs and Section 503 audits. The agency’s director, Kenneth J. Wolfe, wrote in a letter attached to the report that officials do not have plans to restart either “at this time” due to the August regulation updates. He noted, however, that the agency is investigating contractor complaints alleging disability discrimination.

The agency did agree with a recommendation to conduct strategic workforce planning as well as several suggestions to provide more information to contractors about current compliance requirements.

Earlier this month, new Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling was sworn in after his predecessor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, resigned following a series of scandals.

Civil servants with disabilities have recently accused several agencies, including the departments of Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services and Labor, of unreasonably denying and delaying decisions on reasonable accommodations requests, particularly for telework.

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Watchdog to examine summertime hack of DHS information network, other incidents

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0400

A forthcoming audit of a key Department of Homeland Security information-sharing network will examine three known security incidents that occurred on agency networks, including an intrusion by outside hackers that Nextgov/FCW first reported this summer, according to a GAO official and another person familiar with the matter.

The review concerns the Homeland Security Information Network, or HSIN, which allows government agencies, law enforcement and other approved partners to exchange sensitive but unclassified information. Its users rely on the platform to share threat reporting, coordinate security for major events and respond to emergencies.

The Government Accountability Office review is expected to document the incidents that occurred between 2023 and 2026 and potentially scrutinize DHS for failing to promptly notify Congress about those security problems, the person familiar said.

The audit is being conducted in response to a directive in the fiscal 2025 defense policy package, said Nate Tranquilli, the acting director of GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice team. The second person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the review. It’s not clear when the final report will be released.

The previously unreported scope of the audit places this summer’s intrusion within a longer history of security problems on the platform. It also raises questions about whether DHS has given Congress and HSIN stakeholder organizations enough detail to understand what may have been exposed.

GAO has identified two incidents stemming from employee and contractor errors, while the most recent involved a malicious actor whose affiliation remains unknown, the person familiar said.

In 2023, a contractor’s coding error allowed HSIN users to access restricted information they were not authorized to see, according to a memo previously obtained by Nextgov/FCW. Another similar incident occurred in 2025, the person familiar said.

Having a HSIN account does not automatically give a user access to everything on the platform. Information is organized into restricted groups, called communities of interest, focused on particular threats, regions or missions. A police official in a border state seeking information about cartel activity, for example, could request admission to a relevant group, with an administrator deciding whether to grant access.

The security incidents have also strained partners’ confidence in the network, according to the first person. Staff at some fusion centers — state and local hubs that bring together law enforcement and other partners to analyze and share threat information — do not know whether their files were accessed without authorization during the various incidents, the person said.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the Senate Intelligence Committee’s vice chairman, previously said HSIN supported security coordination for this summer’s World Cup and America250 events and that the network’s exposure “risks national security.”

During the most recent intrusion, DHS analysts twice dismissed suspicious activity as harmless, allowing hackers to remain inside for weeks, Nextgov/FCW reported in July. An internal incident readout showed suspicious activity beginning in mid-May. By June 4, the intruders had installed hidden access points and stolen credential data used to authenticate access to accounts or systems, prompting personnel to declare an active breach.

It remains unclear what data, if any, was pilfered from the network.

A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an earlier statement, the department said it was “aware of a recent cyber incident involving a specific, unclassified legacy information sharing environment” and had isolated affected systems, addressed the vulnerability and begun a forensic investigation.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to attribute certain remarks to GAO official Nate Tranquilli.

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Cut first, measure later: Watchdogs find problems across foreign affairs agency reorganizations

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:33:28 -0400

While the Trump administration overhauled foreign assistance spending as part of its cost-cutting efforts, a pair of new watchdog reports found that officials have been forced to walk back many of their cuts, including by recalling laid off employees, and have failed to properly track what they modified.

The State Department last year laid off more than 1,000 employees as part of a reorganization at about the same time that it also took over many foreign aid programs after the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Government Accountability Office reported in an analysis published last week that officials were unable to produce data on changes to staffing and grants, leading to questions about the effectiveness of their decisionmaking.

For example, auditors found that State, as of July, cannot account for how many contractors and non-citizen staffers who work at embassies that it employs. GAO said that these groups have historically made up the bulk of the department’s workforce.

“According to State officials, State does not maintain staffing data in a way that allows generating comprehensive data on the composition of its workforce. In the past, State has reported comprehensive data on its workforce, including the number of locally employed and other staff,” auditors wrote. “Without readily available information on the size and composition of its workforce, State cannot be assured that it has the organizational capacity necessary to carry out its mission or to make informed decisions about its operations.”

While State has also canceled about 25% of its foreign assistance grants, contracts and cooperative agreements (nearly 4,300) as of March, totaling roughly $3 billion, GAO reported that there were many inaccuracies in the department’s grants management system. For instance, more than 4,000 awards (out of around 10,000) were categorized as active and terminated.

Additionally, at the start of his second term, President Donald Trump signed a directive pausing foreign assistance for 90 days for a review to ensure that future spending aligned with his priorities. But GAO said that State officials were unable to provide guidance regarding how foreign assistance is assessed under the new criteria.

The watchdog recommended that State correct any inaccuracies in its grant management system, figure out how to develop comprehensive data on its workforce and document standards for assessing the alignment of foreign assistance programs with administration priorities. Officials agreed with all three.

U.S. Agency for Global Media

In March 2025, the president signed an executive order directing several agencies, including the USAGM — which oversees Voice of America, an international broadcaster that provides service in several languages — to eliminate their non-statutory activities and “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.” But the inspector general for the State Department reported last week that USAGM’s “reduction in operations was done without a detailed analysis of the cost or the impact on the organization’s overall mission.”

USAGM in June 2025 sent reduction in force notices to more than 600 employees, but they had to be reissued two months later because of errors. It’s unclear if those layoffs will take effect because of an ongoing court case, but, as of July, more than 400 employees are on administrative leave at an estimated biweekly cost to the government of $3.2 million.

Additionally, auditors found that officials are recalling staffers on “an ad hoc basis as agency needs were identified rather than based on strategic workforce planning.” For example, VOA Persian-language service employees were brought back after the war in Iran started.

Auditors reported that the agency also:

Canceled IT contracts that prevented it from running 24-hour cybersecurity monitoring and support service. Officials said that they are now reinitiating some of those contracts and hiring additional employees.
Lost the ability to “maintain key accounting processes and controls over accounting transactions or support an audit in a complete and timely manner" due to staff reductions.
Moved to a new location that employees warned would not meet agency requirements. “After taxpayer resources were used to cover the costs of the move, USAGM found that, as reported by internal subject matter experts, the new building did not meet the agency's needs. As a result, USAGM moved again, returning to a building that it previously occupied.”

As happened at other agencies, the IG found that Department of Government Efficiency staffers often disregarded USAGM employee input during the reorganization.

The president tapped Kari Lake, a former journalist and unsuccessful GOP Arizona Senate candidate, to be a senior adviser at USAGM. She’s accused the agency of financial mismanagement and spreading “fake news.”

However Michael Rigas, a senior appointee in the State Department, is the acting CEO of USAGM. And Sarah B. Rogers, the undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, is the nominee for the permanent position.

The IG made several recommendations, including that USAGM determine what its “statutory minimum requirements” are, set measurable agency goals and develop a strategic workforce plan. Rigas concurred with all of the recommendations.

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Housing finance agency chief moves to slash watchdog’s budget, leading Democrats to demand his resignation

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:06:58 -0400

Congressional Democratic leaders on Thursday called on Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte to resign after he moved to cut the housing regulator’s watchdog office budget to a level that the inspector general warned would “substantially inhibit” its ability to conduct independent oversight.

On Wednesday, FHFA announced that its IG office would be scaled back after a review found that its budget and staffing were “extraordinary outlier[s]” compared with “peer OIGs.”

“FHFA's decision reflects its responsibility to ensure that every dollar is used responsibly, efficiently and for a clearly documented purpose,” the agency said in a press release. “FHFA fully supports the independence and mission of the Office of Inspector General.”

In a letter sent to lawmakers that same day, however, James Hodge, who is performing the duties of the FHFA IG, argued that the watchdog office’s budget is warranted because of the housing agency’s role as regulator and conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“OIG’s budget determination process directly derives from the unique mission and authorities of FHFA,” he wrote. “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a combined asset total exceeding $7.8 trillion and OIG is the primary law enforcement entity responsible for ensuring that mortgage fraud in this market is investigated and prosecuted.”

The president’s fiscal 2027 budget, which was released in April, proposed $55 million for the FHFA IG. Hodge wrote that he wasn’t informed by the agency that it would be reduced to $20 million until Aug. 31. The new fiscal year began on Thursday.

In response, Hodge said that the agency will need to cut its staffing by up to 80%, close all field offices and “eliminate our capacity to effectively conduct criminal investigation of mortgage, bank and other fraud schemes involving the entities FHFA regulates.”

The IG head reported that the office’s criminal enforcement program has yielded more than 1,270 convictions and nearly $75 billion in monetary results since 2011. The Trump administration has launched several initiatives to combat fraud in federal programs.

FHFA and its OIG are not funded through congressionally approved appropriations; rather, the entities receive money from assessments on entities they regulate.

Senior congressional Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., criticized FHFA’s decision to cut the IG’s funding.

“Pulte’s corrupt crusade to protect himself and President Trump from accountability will likely result in the firing of approximately 40 law enforcement personnel who protect families from mortgage fraud,” they said in a statement. “Bill Pulte should resign, and if he does not, Congress must hold him accountable.”

Likewise, Mark Lee Greenblatt, the former Interior IG who was fired when Trump removed nearly 20 of the watchdogs at the start of his second term, said in a video posted to LinkedIn that: “Everyone should be up in arms about this unilateral move by an agency head which, as far as I know, is unprecedented in the 50-year history of the inspector general community.”

Last year, the president removed the former acting FHFA IG reportedly after he shared information with the prosecutor’s office investigating New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud and was planning to notify Congress that the agency was not cooperating with IG investigators.

Pulte issued criminal referrals against several of Trump’s political opponents, including James, Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. And the president has replaced acting IGs at several agencies.

Earlier this year, Pulte had a roughly six-week tenure as acting national intelligence director that was marked by several rounds of staff cuts.

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Trump’s new Education IG nominee continues dizzying run of leadership changes at the watchdog office

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:01:00 -0400

President Donald Trump swapped out the nominee to head the Education Department inspector general office, a watchdog agency that has experienced frequent leadership turnover since the start of his second administration.

On Monday, the president nominated Mark Priebe to be the Education IG. Until recently, the nominee served as the department’s acting IG. Trump withdrew the nomination of Heidi Semann, who also had a stint as acting Education IG, for the position on Sept. 17.

Priebe has been a senior official at the Education OIG since 2017 and previously worked as an auditor for other agencies. Government Executive reported when he became acting IG in 2025 that he appears to have shared social media posts supporting Trump.

The nominee also said during a panel in July that he wasn’t concerned about the president’s firing of nearly 20 IGs: “If a new administration comes in and says we want all of our own IGs, that's fine. I really think that the executive branch should have some say over their policies and their procedures and how they enact that.”

Education’s IG position opened up after Trump fired Sandra Bruce as part of the mass firing of IGs at the start of his second term. Deputy Education IG René Rocque then became acting IG, but she was replaced in summer 2025 after notifying Congress that auditors “experienced unreasonable denials and repeated delays” from department officials during a review of staff reductions that halved the agency’s workforce. The administration is seeking to dismantle Education.

The OIG did issue a report in June, while Priebe was acting head, that layoffs at Education during the first two months of Trump’s second term resulted in the agency being unable to perform legally required activities. Auditors wrote that the department did not provide all requested information or allow “unfettered” access to staffers, which restricted the review.

Last year, Rocque was swapped out for Heidi Semann, a senior special agent who came from the Federal Reserve Board OIG. The president is allowed to replace an acting IG, but he is limited to selecting an employee of any OIG.

Semann’s tenure as acting Education IG came to a close at the end of 2025, after which Priebe took over, due to time limits on acting officials in the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. But the president in May then submitted her nomination, which he has since withdrawn, for the position.

In response to a request for comment, the OIG told Government Executive that Priebe left the agency on Monday and that Rocque is, once again, the acting Education IG. Nominees generally cannot serve in an acting capacity for a position after they’ve been nominated.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the nomination swap.

The Rhode Island Current reported that Priebe on Monday withdrew his application to serve as that state’s IG.

Also on Monday, the president nominated Robert Steinau to serve as the IG for NASA. According to his biography on the office’s website, Steinau is the assistant IG for investigations at the space agency and has been with that OIG since 2009.

While many of Trump’s initial IG nominees previously served in his first or second administration, raising concerns about independent oversight, some of his recent picks, including Priebe and Steinau, have experience working in an OIG. That being said, the president last month nominated Dennis Kirk, a co-author of the conservative presidential transition initiative Project 2025, to serve as IG at the Interior Department.

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Dozens of federal immigration employees stayed in sensitive positions despite security concerns, inspector general reports

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:54:50 -0400

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services let dozens of its employees stay in national security positions even after they were determined to be ineligible for the roles due to security concerns or damaging information about them was uncovered, according to a new watchdog report. The Homeland Security Department, however, countered that the inspector general overstated its conclusions.

“Employees found to have criminal records, financial instability or anti-government ideologies may be more susceptible to coercion, blackmail or foreign influence,” auditors wrote. “Allowing employees whom USCIS deemed a security risk to remain in positions where they may access highly sensitive information undermines USCIS’ mission. Further, such employees could make immigration decisions that gravely damage national security.”

In total, the IG reported that, as of April 2025, 10 USCIS staffers held national security positions for an average of about seven years after they were disqualified from holding a sensitive position or a security clearance. For example, one individual stayed in such a position for more than a dozen years after their security clearance was denied.

But Jeffrey M. Bobich, a senior DHS official, asserted in a letter attached to the report that USCIS employees without a security clearance were barred from accessing classified information or conducting sensitive work while they appealed their clearance revocation. The IG, however, said that it could not verify this because the agency did not provide documentation.

Auditors also found 13 USCIS employees working in national security positions without a decision on file regarding their suitability for the role. A suitability determination is a step in the federal government’s personnel vetting process to gauge, after an investigation, if a staffer’s “character or conduct” is appropriate for the position.

“These employees were left in place despite USCIS possessing derogatory information [about them] such as marriage fraud, tax evasion, potential money laundering and ongoing contact with individuals illegally residing in the United States,” they wrote.

The Office of Personnel Management this year finalized a rule expanding suitability determinations, which previously only applied to federal job applicants, to current civil servants. Under the regulation, the HR agency can fire feds for post-appointment conduct.

While the IG included details about the security clearance denial cases in the report, some of the information is blacked out. Investigators included a note on the report’s front page that: “OIG determined that some of the department’s requested redactions lacked adequate justification and we were unable to resolve the matter with the department. To avoid further delay of the report, we have redacted the contested material pursuant to the department’s request and marked it with an asterisk.”

Investigators argued that DHS policy does not clearly assign roles for various officials when it comes to determining what to do when an employee is deemed ineligible for a national security position.

“USCIS’ approach reflects a pattern of giving individuals extended time and benefit of the doubt, even when the information warrants disqualification under federal adjudicative guidelines,” they wrote.

The IG made several recommendations, including that USCIS reevaluate the employees in national security positions without eligibility or a clearance and set timeframes for removing or reassigning employees after they’ve exhausted their appeal rights.

While DHS concurred with all of the recommendations, officials also contended that the report “omit[s] key information, circumstance and context.” For example, they wrote that the agency removed or reassigned 48 employees after they were determined to be ineligible for sensitive positions and an additional 52 staffers left during the appeals process.

DHS also said that the employees in the report were subject to continuous vetting under Trusted Workforce 2.0, a background check modernization initiative.

“It is simply incorrect to suggest that these employees occupied national security positions for years without appropriate vetting,” Bobich wrote.

Personnel vetting is not just a problem at USCIS. The government-wide security clearance process is on the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list of federal programs “with serious vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement or in need of transformation.”

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Watchdog won’t discipline agencies over partisan shutdown posts but warns against ‘derogatory’ messaging

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:32:59 -0400

The Office of Special Counsel on Friday said that it is not pursuing disciplinary action over widespread messaging from agencies blaming the fall 2025 government shutdown on Democrats because officials misconstrued an earlier Hatch Act decision that they thought permitted the communications. But OSC staffers were not able to correct that misinterpretation at the time because they were furloughed due to the funding lapse.

The Hatch Act is an ethics law enforced by OSC that limits the political activities of federal employees. Specifically, civil servants are not permitted to engage in political activity while on duty or in their official capacity.

In the report, OSC said that it received more than 1,000 complaints about partisan messages from the White House and 37 agencies during the record-breaking shutdown, which ended in November.

At the time, Democratic lawmakers and good government nonprofits pointed to banners on agency websites blaming congressional Democrats for the shutdown and furloughed Education Department employees reporting that their out-of-office messages were modified to express the same sentiment as examples of Hatch Act violations.

OSC also cited a satirical webpage from the White House called “mysafespace” that pretended to be a social media profile for congressional Democrats.

“That fake profile contained a biography section that included, ‘Hey we’re Democrats in the House and Senate. We love DEI, transgender for everyone, and handing out taxpayer benefits to illegal immigrants,’ listed as heroes ‘anyone who identifies as a radical leftist[,] transnational gangs, [and] illegal immigrants,’ and made multiple references to the shutdown.”

Agencies generally defended these messages to OSC by referencing a 2024 advisory opinion finding that former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona did not violate the Hatch Act when he sent a letter to federal student loan borrowers criticizing lawsuits from “Republican elected officials” that temporarily blocked certain student debt forgiveness plans.

In that opinion, OSC staffers determined that there wasn’t evidence suggesting Cardona intended to influence election results and that the agency historically hasn’t considered references to a political party in discussions of pending legislation or government policy to constitute prohibited political activity.

OSC employees in Friday’s report said that the earlier opinion was not intended to be applied so broadly but that agencies’ interpretation was “understandable, especially because agencies could not consult OSC for clarification during the shutdown because OSC’s Hatch Act Unit staff was furloughed.”

“Because of agencies’ reasonable reliance on the 2024 advisory, OSC has determined that disciplinary action is neither warranted nor appropriate in the shutdown messaging cases,” they wrote. “Further investigation to determine facts like how the communications were developed and the roles of individual employees would tax OSC’s limited resources and not materially change the outcome.”

The agency clarified, however, that similar partisan messaging in the future still could run afoul of the Hatch Act.

“Some of the shutdown messaging had the clear non-electoral purpose of influencing pending legislation — namely the pending appropriations bills that would have restored government funding — while others had the non-electoral purpose of conveying operational impacts. Neither is prohibited under the Hatch Act,” staffers wrote. “But the derogatory tone and broad dissemination of some communications might weigh in favor of finding that their purpose went beyond influencing legislation to affecting the outcome of future elections, a purpose the Hatch Act prohibits.”

The Senate in August confirmed Charles Baldis, a former GOP Senate staffer, as special counsel, though he’s been leading OSC since spring 2025 as the designee of the former acting chief. In 2025, the president removed the former special counsel — Hampton Dellinger, who was appointed by President Joe Biden — before the end of his five-year term.

In August, the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to OSC criticizing the length of time it is taking to complete Hatch Act investigations into six senior administration officials, five of which have been pending for more than 10 months. In response, the agency said that it “doesn’t comment on open cases.”

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ICE’s $45 billion detention expansion is littered with costly missteps, watchdog reports

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:19:41 -0400

The Trump administration does not have a plan on how to spend billions in additional funding for building and otherwise purchasing new facilities to detain migrants “resulting in wasted, or potentially wasted, resources,” according to a Government Accountability Office report that was published on Thursday.

“In the absence of a comprehensive strategic plan to guide detention expansion, [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] has wasted funds on unsuccessful detention initiatives and lacks important information about the long-term affordability of its investments,” auditors wrote.

For example, ICE reported purchasing 11 warehouses for $1.07 billion to repurpose as detainment facilities, but, as of June, officials are now working to sell seven of those properties.

In addition to spending more than $20 million on nonrecoverable costs (e.g. zoning) and ongoing utilities, GAO also warned that the warehouses could lead to additional waste if ICE sells the buildings for less than the $707 million they purchased them for.

Auditors also reported that the Homeland Security Department reimbursed Florida for $608.4 million through a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant program for the detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.” Earlier this month, the DHS inspector general reported that the center, which closed in June, “did not provide detainees with sufficient living space, creating cramped conditions for detainees who spent most of their time in their housing units, which may harm detainees’ physical and mental health.”

Specifically, GAO faulted ICE for not entering into an agreement with Florida before the facility opened.

“ICE typically negotiates detention facility costs before it enters into contracts or agreements for detention facilities. However, according to ICE officials, senior leadership directed implementation of this initiative,” auditors wrote. “As a result, ICE did not follow its normal process of entering into a contract or intergovernmental service agreement with the state of Florida and, as a result, did not negotiate costs for [Alligator Alcatraz].”

Auditors also flagged that ICE spent about $43 million from the start of fiscal 2025 through June 30, 2026, on detaining migrants at Guantanamo Bay. While the administration at one point had plans to house 30,000 individuals there, the average daily population of noncitizens at the naval station in fiscal 2026 was 16.

The congressional watchdog also criticized an agreement between ICE and the Bureau of Prisons to house migrants, as the median bed rate at the eight participating BOP facilities was $182 daily per detained noncitizen in fiscal 2026 compared with a median bed rate of $92 for ICE centers. And the auditors referenced a June GAO report that found an immigration detention facility that opened in 2025 on a military base in Texas generated millions in waste, such as paying for meals when there were no detainees, and experienced other issues that “posed serious risks to the safety and security of both detained noncitizens and staff in the facility.”

As the Trump administration pursues mass deportations, ICE received $45 billion through fiscal 2029 in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to increase detention capacity. In comparison, the agency got about $3.8 billion in fiscal 2025 annual appropriations for detention facilities.

Likewise, ICE’s average daily population of detained noncitizens increased 71% between Jan. 20, 2025, and July 30, 2026, going from around 39,300 migrants to nearly 67,200.

GAO recommended that ICE develop a strategy for its efforts to increase the number of detention facilities. DHS concurred and provided an estimated completion date of Aug. 31, 2027, but the auditors cautioned that “given ICE’s unprecedented multi-year detention funding and the potential for continued waste of taxpayer dollars, more timely completion may be warranted.”

Last week, the White House withdrew the nomination of Richard “Lance” Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper, to lead ICE.

The current acting director of ICE is David Venturella, a longtime federal immigration official and former vice president of the private prison company GEO that has received billions through federal contracts by detaining immigrants at its facilities across the country. The last time the Senate confirmed someone to lead ICE was 11 years ago.

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Congress — not the president — should appoint the next GAO head, bipartisan coalition argues

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:55:49 -0400

A bipartisan coalition on Monday argued that lawmakers should enact reforms so that the next head of the Government Accountability Office is appointed without the president’s involvement.

“We urge Congress to resolve the institutional framework for selecting the next comptroller general before the next appointment is made,” according to the letter organized by the American Governance Institute. “Congress, and Congress alone, should choose its agency heads.”

The Institute is a fiscally sponsored project of the Fund for Constitutional Government nonprofit. More than 20 other individuals and organizations signed the letter, including nonprofits critical of the Trump administration such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Partnership for Public Service and the Project On Government Oversight as well as right-leaning groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the R Street Institute.

GAO is housed within the legislative branch and examines the effectiveness and efficiency of agency programs. For fiscal 2025, the agency reported that its work generated $62.7 billion in financial benefits for the federal government.

Under the current process, the comptroller general selection procedure begins with a commission of 10 senior House and Senate lawmakers from both parties that recommends individuals for the position to the president. Whoever the president selects is subject to Senate confirmation for one nonrenewable 15-year term.

The organizations behind the letter did not prescribe how the comptroller general should be chosen without the president’s involvement but also contended that the existing congressional review panel doesn’t need to be reinvented.

“Whatever structure Congress chooses, preserving GAO's independence, impartiality, professionalism and credibility across party lines is essential to its ability to serve Congress and hold the federal government accountable,” they wrote. “It is time to change the process by which the comptroller general is chosen so the next person to serve in that office is chosen solely by Congress.”

The comptroller general position opened up in December 2025 when Gene Dodaro retired. Orice Williams Brown, the agency’s chief operating officer, is currently leading GAO in an acting capacity.

If Congress acts on the letter’s suggestion, it would continue a trend of lawmakers claiming hiring and firing authority over legislative branch agency heads from the president.

The House in June passed, by voice vote, the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act (H.R. 6028) that would require the librarian of Congress and director of the Government Publishing Office to be appointed by a bipartisan congressional commission. Currently, those positions are chosen by the president subject to Senate approval.

The librarian of Congress leads the more than 200-year-old cultural institution and overseer of copyright law, while the GPO distributes official government publications.

Trump in 2025 removed Carla Hayden as the librarian of Congress. Under the House measure, however, an official in either position could only be removed by a majority vote of the House and Senate majority and minority leaders.

Likewise, President Joe Biden in 2023 enacted a bill that authorized a bipartisan congressional commission to appoint or remove an architect of the Capitol, who leads the office that preserves and maintains the complex.

The Trump administration has criticized GAO, particularly over instances when the agency found that officials violated rules around impoundments, which is when the executive branch delays or withholds congressionally approved spending. Lawmakers also have accused agencies of not cooperating with and being slow to respond to GAO audits under the current president.

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Interior watchdog clears official over agency work involving his former oil industry employer

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:12:53 -0400

An agency watchdog failed to substantiate allegations that a senior Interior Department official violated ethics rules by participating in matters that impacted his former employer, according to a report that was published on Wednesday.

The investigation covers the involvement of Matthew Giacona — the acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees energy development in the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf — in a 2025 opinion regarding the impact of oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico on protected marine species.

Prior to his government service, Giacona was the vice president of government affairs at the National Ocean Industries Association, which represents offshore oil and gas companies. As part of his federal ethics paperwork, according to the Interior Department inspector general, Giacona agreed “not [to] participate in particular matters involving specific parties in which NOIA is a party or represents a party” but that “did not extend to NOIA’s individual members.”

Giacona began to work on the 2025 opinion, which NOIA was already approved to provide feedback on, when he joined the department in March 2025. He told the IG that he wasn’t aware of NOIA’s involvement and that “he did not meet with NOIA personally or in his official capacity since joining the DOI.” Investigators did not uncover any evidence to contradict that assertion.

Even so, the IG reported that Giacona’s involvement in the 2025 opinion would not have run afoul of ethics rules because the analysis deals with oil and gas drilling in the Gulf generally as opposed to any specific action by NOIA.

“The [2025 opinion] evaluates how oil and gas activities regulated by BOEM and [Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement] may affect protected species and habitats in the Gulf of [Mexico],” investigators wrote. “[Its] provisions apply broadly to all oil and gas activities conducted in the Gulf. It does not, in and of itself, affect the legal rights of specific, identified parties.”

The IG noted that Giacona could have broken his ethics agreement if he was involved in lawsuits, to which NOIA is a party, filed in response to the Gulf opinion, but the office did not find any evidence of such participation.

The report also covers an April 2025 incident in which the federal government affairs manager for the oil and gas company Chevron texted Giacona on his personal device requesting a meeting regarding the 2025 opinion. Giacona replied that he couldn’t do external meetings until his ethics paperwork was cleared, referred her to another staffer and emailed screenshots of their conversation to his agency email address.

Investigators likewise determined that this did not violate any ethics rules because Chevron was approved to consult on the opinion and that any other entity participating in the analysis had the ability to request a meeting.

“Officials familiar with the process told us that there is no formal mechanism for Gulf [opinion] applicants to request a meeting and provide their feedback but that they can contact either the BOEM point of contact that is provided to all applicants or any BOEM staff with whom they have a professional, pre-existing relationship,” they wrote.

President Donald Trump in August reportedly installed Dennis Kirk, a co-author of the conservative Project 2025 presidential transition initiative, as a political appointee in the Interior IG office. Kirk is also the nominee to serve as the watchdog.

Former Interior IG Mark Lee Greenblatt, who was removed from his position in a mass firing of the watchdogs at the start of Trump’s second term, told Government Executive by email that this IG report “seems legitimate” but that Kirk’s appointment erodes credibility.

“This seems to be consistent with how we treated similar inquiries during my tenure, so I didn't get a sense of partisan interference from this one,” he wrote. “But this is exactly the problem with having a mole like Dennis Kirk inserted into the OIG — it instantly plants a seed of doubt in everyone's minds about whether there was partisan interference.”

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Agencies spent nearly $10 billion for feds not to work in 2025

Erich Wagner — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:18:20 -0400

The federal government spent nearly $10 billion placing more than 100,000 federal workers on paid administrative leave for extended periods last year, a sixfold increase from two years prior driven largely by the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program aimed at encouraging feds to quit public service.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office found that around 70% of that money, or $6.7 billion went to feds who opted into the DRP, a program by which agencies paid employees to stay home, in exchange for their resignation by September 2025—or December of that year, for retirement-eligible workers. While federal employees took 4 million workdays worth of leave in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024, that number ballooned to 21.6 million workdays last year.

“Paid administrative leave usage peaked in July 2025 at nearly 3 million workdays; approximately 2.5 million of those workdays were associated with the deferred resignation program,” GAO wrote. “In 2023 and 2024, fewer than 600 federal employees took more than 90 workdays of paid administrative leave; in 2025, almost 100,000 employees took more than 90 days of paid administrative leave.”

The deferred resignation program came shortly after the Office of Personnel Management issued long-awaited regulations implementing the 2016 Administrative Leave Act, a law aimed at curbing the use of paid administrative leave.

OPM told agencies that those regulations would not take effect until September 2025, and later proposed a new rule codifying workforce realignment as a valid use of paid leave. OPM’s current guidance for agencies considering a deferred resignation program is to cap the period of paid administrative leave at 12 weeks.

GAO noted that its estimates regarding the costs of leave approved in connection with the deferred resignation program and other workforce restructuring efforts are likely a modest overcount. That’s because employees commonly misreport similar forms of paid time off, such as for a federal holiday or a doctor’s appointment, as well as the fact that OPM has not set up a dedicated leave category for leave connected to a workforce restructuring effort.

That means policymakers can’t know whether the Trump administration’s workforce reductions are actually reducing the cost of government, the report found. OPM Director Scott Kupor has previously said the DRP would save taxpayers $20 billion each year.

“To calculate the long-term government-wide savings of workforce reduction efforts, OPM needs to know the short-term costs of using paid administrative leave,” GAO wrote. “[Without] an accurate understanding of how much paid administrative leave costs the federal government, there is no way to accurately determine to what extent the government-wide cost-savings goal is being met. OPM officials stated that they have no plans to create an additional subcategory of paid administrative leave associated with workforce reductions.”

GAO recommended the OPM acknowledge the data reliability issues inherent in its public-facing paid leave data, as well as create a new category in federal payroll systems to report workforce-reduction related paid leave. In its response, the dedicated HR agency reversed course and said it would begin the process of creating a new leave category to better track the usage of and reasoning for paid leave.

“OPM agrees that a dedicated administrative leave data element for workforce reduction efforts would enable more timely reporting on its use and simplify future analysis,” Kupor wrote. “OPM will begin the process of developing a new paid administrative leave category focused on workforce reduction efforts, in coordination with agencies and payroll service providers.”

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Hatch Act complaints against Trump officials continue to pile up as investigations go on for nearly a year

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:01:00 -0400

Last week, congressional Democrats and good government groups accused multiple Trump officials of violating the Hatch Act, a law that limits the political activities of government officials.

While such organizations have filed several complaints since the start of the president’s second term, the agency that enforces the ethics law does not appear to have issued any findings yet concerning the potentially prohibited activities of senior administration appointees.

Attorney General Todd Blanche

House Judiciary Democrats on social media criticized Blanche ahead of his speech before the GOP’s midterm convention.

“The nation’s chief law enforcement officer will be violating federal law on national TV in front of the entire country,” according to the post. “It’s dumbfounding and unprecedented.”

An X account for the Justice Department replied that Blanche’s appearance did not run afoul of the Hatch Act because it was in his personal, rather than official, capacity and had been approved by ethics officials. While the law generally prohibits civil servants from engaging in political activities if they’re doing so in an official capacity (e.g. their government title is used), most federal employees can engage in such activities outside of work hours.

Still, the nonprofit Public Citizen previously argued that Blanche broke the Hatch Act over a speech that he gave at an August campaign rally because his position is subject to stricter rules. Further restricted employees — generally those at intelligence and enforcement agencies – are not permitted to participate in partisan political campaigns.

A DOJ spokesperson at the time said that Public Citizen’s complaint was “baseless.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy

On Sept. 10, Democracy Defenders Fund, a legal organization that is focused on countering the Trump administration, filed a Hatch Act complaint against Duffy over an August speech he gave at a super PAC event supporting GOP candidates in Michigan in which he discussed department business and urged attendees to vote for Republican candidates.

“Although Secretary Duffy is not prohibited from engaging in political activity in his personal capacity, he cannot use his official authority to influence an election,” the organization officials wrote. “That is, however, exactly what Secretary Duffy did when he spoke extensively about official government matters during a political speech in a way that utilized his position ‘to strengthen the impact’ of his political activity.”

The Office of Special Counsel, which enforces the Hatch Act, previously found that officials during the Biden administration, including Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro and Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley, violated the law when they criticized Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election during media interviews that were primarily about their government work.

A DOT spokesperson characterized the complaint as “another baseless political attack.”

"The secretary’s participation was in his personal capacity and consistent with longstanding practice for presidential appointees,” they said in a statement to Government Executive.

Duffy has been the subject of several ethics complaints, including with respect to a deleted post on his department social media account promoting his wife’s book and a web travel series featuring his family that was funded by companies regulated by DOT. The department said that the post was "inadvertently retweeted” by a staffer, and the secretary asserted that ethics officials cleared his participation in the show.

Grant Terminations

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit, on Sept. 9 filed a Hatch Act complaint after administration officials said in court documents that they canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.”

“Any agency officials involved in making these decisions based on the political identity of the recipient likely violated the Hatch Act, because they are conditioning funding on a recipient’s support or opposition to a particular political candidate or party,” wrote CREW President and CEO Donald Sherman.

Neither the Office of Management and Budget or the Energy Department responded to a request for comment.

While the Hatch Act is typically associated with election-related activity, it also can apply to how government programs are implemented. For example, OSC in 2025 determined that a Federal Emergency Management Agency supervisor violated the law for directing workers responding to Hurricane Milton in Florida to skip over homes with signs supporting Trump.

Last month, CREW sent a letter to OSC criticizing the length of time it is taking to complete Hatch Act investigations into six senior administration officials, five of which have been pending for more than 10 months. In response, the agency said that it “doesn’t comment on open cases.”

With respect to the Duffy and grant termination Hatch Act complaints, an OSC spokesperson confirmed to Government Executive that the agency received them but did not otherwise have a comment.

Penalties for violating the Hatch Act can include removal from federal service, grade reduction, debarment from government employment for up to five years, suspension or a civil penalty of up to $1,000.

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Musk should testify about overstated savings from DHS contract cancellations, Democrats argue

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:07:50 -0400

Two House Democrats last week requested that Elon Musk and other Department of Government Efficiency officials testify under oath after a new watchdog report found that the cost-cutting initiative overstated its savings from Homeland Security Department contract cancellations.

“Elon Musk and DOGE tried to sell the American people a lie: that firing federal workers and gutting public services would make government more efficient and save taxpayers billions,” said Reps. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, and James Walkinshaw, D-Va., in a statement. “Instead, they inflicted lasting damage, indiscriminately cancelled contracts and fired essential personnel.”

The Government Accountability Office reported that DHS fully or partially terminated 438 contracts between Jan. 20 and Sept. 30, 2025, as a result of DOGE’s mandate to reduce agency spending, including on contracts. Auditors found that, as a result, the department deobligated more than $249 million but also obligated $157 million in new costs to settle the canceled agreements with contractors and for continued work under partially terminated contracts.

While that results in a net of about $92 million in savings, DHS reported that the 2025 contract terminations could generate more than $10.5 billion in reduced spending. Unlike GAO’s analysis, which looked at how much money was deobligated, the department’s methodology relied on the maximum amount that could’ve been spent under the canceled contracts.

In addition to criticizing DHS’ analysis, the auditors found that 95% of the $10.5 billion in potential cost savings is attributable to 30 terminated IT contracts. But the department, in some cases, is using other contracts to obtain those services.

“According to the Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, in fiscal year 2025, DHS obligated over $1.7 billion through existing government-wide contracts to meet these [IT] requirements,” they wrote. “Thus, $1.7 billion of potential costs under these contracts were not avoided but incurred through other contracts.”

Thompson and Walkinshaw argued that Musk and other DOGE officials should testify in a hearing about the contract terminations, including who approved the DHS estimates and how the cancellations may have impacted department functions.

A DHS spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive that officials have "reviewed thousands of contracts, ended hundreds that were no longer mission-critical and redirected resources to higher-priority operational needs. That is responsible stewardship: identifying wasteful or lower-priority spending, ending unnecessary contracts and ensuring taxpayer dollars support DHS’s most critical operations."

Last month, GAO issued a report that found multiple errors with how DOGE calculated its savings. For example, about $34.6 billion of the $61 billion estimated to have been generated from terminated contracts either came from contracts that were never canceled or there wasn’t evidence that the contracts were terminated.

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Inspectors general are facing an identity crisis. Here’s how some former IGs would preserve the watchdogs’ independence

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:26:32 -0400

As President Donald Trump installs individuals with political histories into inspector general positions, which historically have been nonpartisan agency watchdog roles, a panel of current and former oversight officials on Wednesday discussed what actions lawmakers could take to protect IG independence moving forward. But the speakers acknowledged that many of their recommendations have tradeoffs and weaknesses.

“I don't know what the answer is,” said Mark Lee Greenblatt, the former IG at the Interior Department who was removed in a mass firing of the watchdogs at the start of the president’s second term. “It is a very, very hard call. I think you can adopt some measures; the question is whether Congress is interested in them.”

Greenblatt said at the Government Oversight and Accountability Symposium, which was hosted by George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, that a recent Supreme Court decision that expanded the president’s ability to fire officials who previously had removal protections complicates any attempt to set up new guardrails. He mused that sequestration, or automatic funding cuts, if a president improperly fires an IG could align with the justices’ ruling. But he noted that may create a perverse incentive for removing a watchdog.

“The problem is that maybe the president wants to cut the budget of that agency, and this is a great backdoor way to do it,” he said.

Greenblatt also pointed to a blog by Fernando Laguarda, an American University law professor, that argued IGs still could be protected from removal under a different recent Supreme Court decision that temporarily blocked Trump’s attempted firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

Allison Lerner, the former IG at the National Science Foundation, recommended on Wednesday that Congress set up a dedicated appropriation for the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. Currently, the central watchdog group receives its funding through contributions from participating IG offices.

The Office of Management and Budget blocked CIGIE from receiving funding for about a month-and-a-half in 2025, arguing that IGs “have become corrupt, partisan and in some cases, have lied to the public.” The White House backtracked, however, after pushback from Senate Republicans.

But Lerner, who previously led CIGIE, said that her recommendation pre-dates the latest conflict with the administration.

“By taking a tiny percentage of every OIG's budget and having that shifted over to CIGIE to fund its operations, in practice that's been truly challenging to manage,” she said. “I'm concerned that it may become even more challenging if people decide that they simply don't want to transfer that money over to CIGIE.”

Greenblatt also recommended that Congress should codify CIGIE’s practice of reviewing possible IG nominees. Tammy Hull, the IG for the U.S. Postal Service and acting CIGIE chair from January 2025 through April 2026, told the audience that the review panel no longer provides input on presidentially appointed IGs but does for those selected by agencies.

There are more than 70 federal IGs; about half are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate while the other half are appointed by an agency head.

CIGIE also runs the Integrity Committee, which oversees investigations into allegations of wrongdoing against an IG or other senior OIG staffers. Lerner contended that the current process “looks like IGs pitted against IGs” and recommended transferring that responsibility to the Office of Special Counsel, which supervises investigations that are prompted by whistleblower complaints.

“Since I've retired, I have time when I'm walking the dog to think about things like the Integrity Committee. My most recent thought was that it might make sense to put the Integrity Committee into the Office of Special Counsel,” she said. “The OSC conducts administrative investigations that are very similar to the investigations that the Integrity Committee does.”

Greenblatt agreed with removing the Integrity Committee from CIGIE but also cautioned that the OSC could be led by a partisan-minded individual. The current special counsel is Charles Baldis, a former GOP Senate staffer. In 2025, Trump removed the incumbent special counsel — Hampton Dellinger, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden — before the end of his five-year term.

House Republicans in July advanced out of committee the Restoring Integrity and Efficiency to Inspector General Oversight Act (H.R. 9725) that would abolish CIGIE. Supporters of the bill pointed to a June report from the Government Accountability Office that found the Integrity Committee frequently fell short of its own process requirements during investigations.

Speakers also stressed the importance of improving IG engagement with the public, particularly with respect to pushing agencies to implement their recommendations.

“We have a comms problem,” Hull said. “I think we have relied on our 20th century brains that say ‘We issue these 25 to 30 page reports. [People] will read them. They will do the right thing.’ The world we live in is not that world.”

Greenblatt touted Lucy Lang, the New York state IG, who frequently promotes her office’s work on social media and even wrote a comic book that uses dog characters to explain what an IG does.

Oversight is the name of the game, and OIG knows how to play it.

We published our 2025 Annual Report on Gaming Commission Oversight, detailing our work to strengthen integrity in the gaming sector.

Read the full report at https://t.co/A18E0DrgaH pic.twitter.com/LbfNCh0Bmi
— NYS Inspector General (@NewYorkStateIG) August 21, 2026

“We need to get in the modern era. We're not issuing 50-page reports and just throwing that out to the world. Zero people will read that,” Greenblatt said. “You have to make it consumable for the average American. You have to make them understand why this matters to them. We're not speaking just to the agency. We're not speaking just to Congress. We have to speak to the American people and have them understand why we are doing this.”

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Federal disability employment program faced widespread compliance problems, whistleblower investigation finds

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:40:18 -0400

A federal agency that oversees a program intended to increase job opportunities for employees with disabilities may not be doing enough to ensure that its government contracts are supporting such workers, an investigation prompted by a whistleblower complaint found.

Additionally, the Office of Special Counsel, which protects whistleblowers, in a letter to the president last week criticized the agency’s response to the investigation, arguing that officials have neglected to take appropriate actions.

Through the AbilityOne program, federal agencies contract with nonprofits that employ workers with disabilities. The initiative supports jobs for 41,000 individuals and provided more than $4.7 billion in products and services to the federal government in fiscal 2025, according to its website. For example, all disposable gloves for the Transportation Security Agency come from organizations that participate in the program.

Nonprofits are eligible for AbilityOne if at least 75% of their “total direct labor hours” are performed by workers who are blind or have “significant disabilities.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2025 the employment rate for people with a disability was 22.8% compared with 65.2% for those without a disability.

A compliance specialist at the AbilityOne Commission, however, submitted a complaint to the OSC alleging that more than 50 participating nonprofits in a sample of 120 still received millions in contracts even though they failed to meet a program requirement during their last review.

This prompted an investigation by the AbilityOne inspector general that found:

In fiscal 2022, 87% of participating nonprofits were out of compliance with at least one program requirement.
There were 50 nonprofits that failed every compliance review between fiscal 2013 and 2022.
The agency did not act on a 2017 complaint by employees at Arbor Products, Inc., which alleged that the organization during an onsite visit “had deceived compliance inspectors into believing that blind or disabled employees were performing all direct labor,” until 2022. At that time, the entity became delinquent in paying program fees, lost its nonprofit status and was kicked out of the program.

Based on the investigation, however, AbilityOne reported that the whistleblower’s allegations were not substantiated and that no violations of law, rule or regulation occurred — perplexing OSC officials.

“AbilityOne exists to create real jobs for people who are blind or have significant disabilities. When large numbers of contractors fail basic program rules for years and the compliance system cannot show those failures were fixed, that is not a paperwork problem,” said Special Counsel Charles Baldis in a statement. “The Commission documented serious weaknesses and then declined to substantiate the whistleblower’s allegations to that effect. That conclusion is not reasonable.”

OSC officials noted that AbilityOne is overhauling its compliance practices and procedures, but they also cautioned that the agency does not appear to have made progress on two IG recommendations: to establish a training program for Commission employees on performing compliance reviews with annual refreshers and to improve the method for verifying the continued nonprofit status of program participants beyond annual self-certification.

Officials from the AbilityOne Commission in a press release last week disputed OSC’s characterizations.

“The Commission determined that the issues identified reflected systemic challenges and historical inconsistencies in a large, decentralized program — not intentional disregard of statutory mandates,” they wrote. “Many of the compliance concerns cited by OSC occurred during periods of operational disruption, including the pandemic, during which temporary flexibilities were granted in good faith and in consultation with relevant stakeholders. It is important to emphasize that recognizing areas for improvement does not equate to finding gross mismanagement, gross waste or statutory violations.”

Regarding the IG recommendations, the officials pointed to a congressionally mandated oversight panel that previously reported that AbilityOne’s workforce is appropriately trained but that the underlying issue is there aren’t enough staffers. They also contended that the agency “has historically followed standard federal practice in accepting IRS determinations and [self-certifications] from participating nonprofit agencies.”

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DHS watchdog says Noem-era policy hampered probe into FEMA employees skipping homes with Trump signs

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:11:26 -0400

The inspector general for the Homeland Security Department said that the scope of his office’s audit into an incident in which Federal Emergency Management Agency employees passed over the homes of disaster survivors based on politics was limited by a lack of action from department officials, including the secretary.

Auditors determined in a report released last week that FEMA staffers violated policy while responding to Hurricane Milton in 2024 when they skipped over 11 homes in Florida for displaying signs in support of Donald Trump at the direction of their supervisor. The Office of Special Counsel reached a similar conclusion last year after its own investigation, and the disaster agency removed the supervisor shortly after the incident occurred.

The IG asserted, however, that the office was not able to determine if political bias or other prohibited practices impacted other disaster responses because FEMA delayed access to records of employees documenting their interactions with survivors. Auditors in March 2025 requested the data, according to the report, but then in September 2025 the contractor supporting the system underpinning such records shut it down “because then-Secretary [Kristi] Noem did not act on the FEMA request to fund the contract before its lapse.”

During his confirmation hearing, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin testified that he would reverse Noem’s policy that required her to sign off on any department spending that is more than $100,000, which critics argued slowed disaster response efforts.

In March, DHS IG Joseph Cuffari notified lawmakers that department officials denied access to requests for information from his office in 11 cases. Cuffari, who was confirmed during Trump’s first term, was spared from the 2025 mass firings of IGs. A panel of agency IGs and other federal investigative officials in 2024 substantiated allegations that Cuffari abused his authority and engaged in substantial misconduct, mostly in relation to an outside investigation into former employees who submitted whistleblower complaints against him.

FEMA officials told the IG that the agency would need to procure a new sole-source contract with the vendor to restore the data on employee interactions with disaster survivors.

The IG also found that FEMA did not consistently provide training to its employees and supervisors on the Hatch Act, which aims to ensure federal programs are implemented in a nonpartisan manner, and that senior officials were not required to review notes from employees about their interactions with disaster survivors. Auditors pointed out that the 2024 incident could have been uncovered earlier, as workers documented that the presence of Trump signs was the reason they skipped certain homes.

DHS’ watchdog recommended that FEMA determine an “appropriate frequency of ethics and Hatch Act training” for all employees who could be deployed following a disaster and that supervisors perform quality control reviews of survivor interaction surveys. The agency concurred with all of the recommendations.

“We’ve made sure that everyone responsible for this incident has been punished, and we’ll make sure that nothing like this ever happens again,” Mullin said in a statement after the report’s release.

Marni Washington, the fired FEMA supervisor, told The Washington Post on Wednesday that some hurricane survivors threatened employees based on their perceived political affiliation and that her team only avoided homes that had a Trump sign and another indicator of hostility, such as a sign that homeowners would shoot trespassers.

Congressional Democrats have accused the administration of politicizing FEMA, pointing to a March media report that the president had approved 89% of disaster funding requests from states with a Republican governor and two Republican senators compared with 23% for states with Democratic leadership.

Trump had proposed eliminating FEMA, but a White House-backed panel in May instead recommended reducing the size of the agency while giving state and local governments a larger share of responsibilities following emergencies.

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Lawmakers call for watchdog review of DOT’s passenger privacy practices

Edward Graham — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:21:44 -0400

Two Democratic lawmakers are calling on the Government Accountability Office to launch an investigation into the Transportation Department’s airline passenger privacy practices, warning that the agency has failed to safeguard U.S. citizens’ personal data by not moving to regulate the practices of commercial airlines.

In a Wednesday letter to GAO acting Comptroller General Orice Brown, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, noted that “although DOT has had sole authority to safeguard passenger data for over 40 years, DOT has never taken a single enforcement action related to privacy.”

The lawmakers added that DOT’s “abdication of its role as a privacy regulator” has allowed passengers’ data to be “exposed to corporate exploitation, warrantless government surveillance, and warrantless seizure of money and other property.”

In one notable case, 404 Media reported in June 2025 that a data broker owned by several U.S. airlines sold Customs and Border Protection access to travelers’ flight information. The Drug Enforcement Administration similarly profiled train and airline passengers using their data to identify individuals for questioning, with the lawmakers’ letter saying the agency “for years bribed airline employees millions of dollars to covertly siphon off Americans’ private data.”

The missive said “a Congressional Research Service review found no instance of [DOT] taking a public enforcement action or issuing civil penalties regarding consumer privacy violations,” despite the agency having four decades’ worth of authority to police such offenses. DOT has said it receives few complaints regarding consumer privacy violations and that it investigates any concerns as they arise — “a reactive approach to airline privacy,” the lawmakers said in a Wednesday press release.

Similar concerns raised by Wyden during the Biden administration ultimately led to DOT launching an industrywide review of U.S. airliners’ privacy practices, with then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg saying in March 2024 that the move was “the beginning of a new initiative by DOT to ensure airlines are being good stewards of sensitive passenger data.”

Despite Wednesday’s letter noting that Transportation’s review included requests for information from major U.S. airlines about their privacy policies and procedures, the lawmakers said that, “more than two years after this announcement, it remains entirely unclear whether a meaningful review ever took place.”

None of the responses from U.S. airlines were ever made public, and Transportation did not release any subsequent reports or take any actions against airlines for privacy violations. Under the Trump administration, the lawmakers said that “DOT appears to have abandoned this effort” and “has not announced any additional privacy reviews.”

Wyden and Brown’s letter calls for GAO to launch a formal investigation “into the DOT’s systemic abdication of its consumer privacy enforcement mandates,” and similarly requests that the watchdog provide legislative recommendations to address “DOT's inaction and compel the agency to more vigorously protect the privacy rights of travelers.”

The missive outlines several priority areas for GAO to review, including reporting on the status of Transportation’s 2024 industrywide privacy practice evaluation, examining the agency’s coordination with the DEA and assessing the current “complaint-driven oversight model” when it comes to investigating potential consumer privacy violations.

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GSA says it’s uncovered ‘record-setting’ $13B in suspected procurement fraud

Christian Robles — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:08:55 -0400

The General Services Administration announced that it has found $13 billion in suspected procurement fraud since March 2026 in what is the largest suspected fraud bust in the agency’s history, according to a Tuesday press release.

In collaboration with the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, GSA uncovered the suspected fraud by using contracting data, public reporting and inspector general enforcement information, the agency said.

“Anyone who lies their way into receiving taxpayer dollars is putting their business, their reputation, and their freedom at risk. GSA is fully committed to working with Vice President [JD] Vance’s task force to root out fraud and protect the integrity of federal procurement,” said GSA Administrator Edward Forst in the release.

GSA said it will refer suspected fraudsters to the Office of the Inspector General or Department of Justice for investigation.

GSA is also conducting a review of COVID-19 spending, the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program spending, contractor eligibility, bid rigging, cybersecurity false claims, bribery and other contractor-integrity risks.

GSA’s $13 billion estimate appears to have been added to fraud.gov, the White House’s official tabulation for suspect fraud, on Tuesday, a Nextgov/FCW comparison of current numbers on the website and previous tallies recorded via the Wayback Machine.

According to Fraud.gov, GSA has prevented $202.2 million in fraud through administrative actions and recovered $29.5 million in fraud through enforcement actions since January 2025.

Spokespeople for GSA and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on the fraud.gov listing by the time of publication.

“As we saw with the efforts from DOGE, this is a trust but verify situation. ‘Suspected’ procurement fraud is a lot different than adjudicating the incidents and seeing the results of the investigations,” Tim Brennan, president of the Center for Procurement Advocacy, told Nextgov/FCW.

“If this number is real, then we need to do more to reinforce the acquisition workforce with attracting additional qualified personnel and providing better training across the government. Contracting officers have incredible workloads and with the early retirements and reductions in force, they will have a harder time preventing fraud in the future. Hopefully this results in positive changes that protect the government from fraud going forward,” he added.

GSA did not offer examples of suspected procurement fraud in its release but examples included in a Breitbart exclusive predate the launch of the White House fraud task force, according to Washington Technology. At least one case predates the Trump administration.

The agency did not respond to the outlet’s request to confirm the Breitbart story or provide information on fraud cases referred to the Justice Department.

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Postal inspectors aren’t being pulled away from mail crime investigations for immigration enforcement, IG reports

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 13:39:02 -0400

Several federal agencies have reassigned employees to support the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, but the U.S. Postal Service’s watchdog found in a new report that any immigration-related work conducted by postal law enforcement officers is limited and has a nexus to mail crime.

“We did not observe any Postal Inspection Service resources diverted solely for immigration enforcement activities,” auditors from the USPS inspector general office wrote.

The IG reported that, since the start of Trump’s second term, the USPIS has reassigned nine inspectors (less than 1%) to a Homeland Security Task Force. Based on agency data, however, none of the transfers were solely related to immigration enforcement and often dealt with threats like drug trafficking, human trafficking and financial crimes.

Likewise, auditors found that 39 postal inspectors (3%) in the same time frame assisted with investigations that had an immigration-related component for another law enforcement agency.

“For these investigations, postal inspectors mainly performed address checks for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and provided investigative support when targets used the mail to traffic drugs and launder money, according to Postal Inspection Service data,” the IG wrote.

USPS OIG’s audit was initiated by a request from lawmakers who wanted to know if “potential resource diversions to immigration enforcement activities” impacted USPIS’s ability to investigate white collar crime.

The watchdog reported that the number of initiated white collar cases increased from 693 in fiscal 2024 to 1,100 in fiscal 2025 and that the number of such cases that were closed or resulted in charges between the two fiscal years marginally decreased.

“This review assessed congressional concerns about the Postal Inspection Service’s involvement in immigration-related activities since January 2025 and did not identify impacts to white-collar crime investigations attributable to resource shifts toward immigration enforcement,” the auditors wrote.

Gary R. Barksdale, the chief postal inspector, agreed with the report’s findings in an attached letter.

“The Postal Inspection Service has not sought, has not been delegated and does not exercise any immigration enforcement authority, and no postal inspector serves in the capacity of an immigration officer,” he wrote.

Trump has fired many agency IGs and replaced several of them with individuals who worked in his first or second administration. The postal IG, however, is appointed (and would be removed) by the USPS Board of Governors and Postal Regulatory Commission.

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Watchdog: NSA’s NDAs don’t comply with whistleblower law

Erich Wagner — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The National Security Agency routinely fails to inform employees of their rights under whistleblower protection laws when they sign non-disclosure agreements, the intelligence agency’s inspector general concluded this week.

Although the NSA is not officially subject to the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, Congress has consistently required most of its provisions—minus those relating to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, who lacks jurisdiction to review matters involving counterintelligence and foreign intelligence—to apply to the agency via annual appropriations laws since 1988.

But according to a new report from the NSA inspector general, most of the agency’s non-disclosure agreements lack the required reference to federal whistleblower protections, meaning its employees “may not be aware” of their rights to disclose violations of law or instances of waste, fraud and abuse.

“We identified five unique NSA-developed NDAs. One of the five NDAs, NSA’s Security Agreement, did not include the current required whistleblower provisions but did include language related to whistleblower protections and had some statutory references,” the inspector general wrote. “The remaining four NDAs made no mention of whistleblower protections . . . Additionally, the OIG identified another five agreements that were not titled or identified as nondisclosure agreements but implied nondisclosure obligations and did not include the required whistleblower protection provisions.”

The report comes as the Trump administration considers promulgating a standardized NDA for use across government. The proposal has drawn bipartisan criticism for the potential chilling effect it could have on employees who witness misconduct while on the job, including by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who requested the inspector general’s review of NSA NDAs.

The watchdog also found that the process by which NSA employees obtain access “compartmented information” include more nondisclosure provisions that similarly lack the needed whistleblower protection language.

“The subject matter experts we spoke with explained that individual offices develop their own access agreement brief sheets using a template, and an affiliate’s acknowledgement of one of these electronic brief sheets serves as the nondisclosure agreement,” the report states. “In interviews with SMEs, two opened brief sheets of their own and noted that the required provisions were not present. We reviewed the template and noted that it lacked inclusion of the required whistleblower protection provisions.”

The inspector general recommended creating a process to ensure all nondisclosure policies, forms and agreements include the statutorily mandated whistleblower protection language, as well as assigning the task to an official within the agency.

NSA concurred with the IG’s recommendations and said it planned to assign compliance to the agency’s chief of staff.

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‘Glaring violations’ of the Hatch Act by senior Trump officials have gone unpunished for months, good government group alleges

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:38:05 -0400

A good government group is asking a federal watchdog why it’s taking so long for officials to resolve Hatch Act complaints that the nonprofit has filed against senior political appointees in the Trump administration.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington on Thursday sent a letter to the Office of Special Counsel, which enforces rules that govern the political activities of federal employees, contending that the agency has opened investigations into six senior officials, five of which have been pending for more than 10 months.

Many of the Hatch Act complaints deal with comments made during media briefings and interviews by officials, such as outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, criticizing democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani when he was a candidate.

Federal employees are not permitted to engage in political activity in their official capacity. For example, the OSC found that Biden Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro and Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley ran afoul of the Hatch Act when they criticized Donald Trump in media interviews ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

“While we understand that financial constraints and abrupt leadership changes by President Trump have challenged law enforcement efforts at agencies including OSC, CREW’s outstanding complaints originate from public interviews and posts that are easily reviewed and assert glaring violations of the law,” wrote CREW President and CEO Donald Sherman.

The organization argued that administration officials will continue to violate the Hatch Act until OSC resolves these complaints. For example, Sherman pointed to Attorney General Todd Blanche’s appearance at a campaign rally for a Republican running for New York governor. Public Citizen, another good government nonprofit, submitted a complaint about that speech earlier this week.

An OSC spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive that the agency “doesn’t comment on open cases.”

Also on Thursday, OSC announced that it filed disciplinary complaints with the Merit Systems Protection Board against two feds who, despite warnings, allegedly ran for partisan political office and solicited political contributions. Both activities are prohibited under the Hatch Act.

Additionally, the agency touted at the end of last year that it resolved hundreds more Hatch Act complaints in fiscal 2025 than it did in fiscal 2024.

But CREW said this points to a divergence in how potential Hatch Act violations are treated depending on the employee’s rank.

“Ethical compliance cannot thrive in the federal government if the most politically powerful officials are allowed to skirt the law while their subordinates are punished for similar activity,” Sherman wrote.

Earlier this month, the Senate confirmed Charles Baldis, a former GOP Senate staffer, as special counsel, though he’s been leading the agency since spring 2025 as the designee of the former acting chief.

During Trump’s first term, the OSC found that several officials, including White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, violated the Hatch Act.

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The watchdog gets watched: GAO’s hiring process length faces scrutiny

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:53:41 -0400

The Government Accountability Office is an independent legislative branch agency that reviews the effectiveness and efficiency of federal programs. For example, in recent weeks, GAO has issued reports finding that the State Department could be overspending on residences for overseas employees because certain housing standards haven’t been updated in more than three decades and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency cut staff without considering the impacts on disaster operations.

GAO’s own watchdog, however, determined in a report published on Monday that the oversight agency is taking longer to hire than other federal agencies and that there are issues with how it measures certain hiring data, which could impede efforts to shorten the time that it takes to recruit.

“The length of GAO’s hiring process increases the agency’s risk of not meeting its stated goal of hiring well-qualified candidates because prospective employees may accept other job opportunities while waiting for GAO to complete its hiring process,” the inspector general for the GAO wrote.

In fiscal 2024, the IG reported that GAO took an average of about 103 days to hire employees into roles that have been deemed mission critical occupations across government (e.g. information technology management). To compare, the agency’s internal hiring target is 98 to 101 days, and the Office of Personnel Management’s hiring goal for executive branch agencies is 80 days.

For instance, it took executive branch agencies that are part of an OPM dashboard an average of 72.1 days to hire for contracting roles in fiscal 2024 compared with 110.1 days for GAO to recruit for identical positions.

GAO’s chief human capital officer defended the hiring length in a letter attached to the report, noting that the agency “relies heavily on multiple rounds of interviews as an important part of our assessment process.” The official also said that GAO allows potential hires to negotiate their salaries, unlike other agencies, “but which may simultaneously add time to the process and may increase our ability to attract a broader applicant pool.”

The IG also reported that the agency inadvertently excluded 20, about 30%, of its fiscal 2024 mission-critical hires from time-to-hire data and that there’s a discrepancy between whether the hiring process starts when human capital staff consult with a hiring manager about a vacancy or when such consultation is complete.

“By using the consultation completion dates, [Human Capital Office]’s calculations would have undercounted the days spent on some hiring actions,” investigators wrote. “Further, HCO staff indicated that consultations often took longer than the allotted two days. However, because HCO did not record the start date for consultations, it cannot determine how long consultations took or accurately assess the length of its hiring process.”

GAO agreed with two of its IG’s recommendations: to periodically review hiring timelines and address inefficiencies and to update all internal documents to reflect the established target hiring time frames.

With respect to a recommendation to ensure all hiring actions are included in time-to-hire calculations, GAO countered that certain actions, such as annual promotions for analysts, shouldn’t be included. And regarding a recommendation about accurately documenting hiring dates, GAO suggested performing separate tracking of early actions in the hiring process (e.g. consultation with hiring manager).

Regardless, GAO officials said they would implement all of the recommendations by April 1, 2027.

The IG also noted that GAO in fiscal 2025 hired fewer than 10 entry-level employees and experienced a net loss of around 100 staffers because it didn’t backfill positions due to “budget constraints.”

The Office of Management and Budget has previously criticized GAO after the agency on several occasions determined that the administration violated rules around impoundments, which is when the executive branch delays or withholds congressionally approved spending.

For fiscal 2026, House Republicans proposed halving GAO’s spending level, but the final appropriations bill kept the agency’s funding flat.

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Attorney general violated Hatch Act ethics rules, nonprofit says

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:22:40 -0400

During Todd Blanche’s confirmation process, Senate Democrats and some Republicans argued that the president’s former personal attorney lacked the independence needed to serve as attorney general. Now, just one week after he was sworn in, a public interest nonprofit is alleging that Blanche has already violated an ethics law that governs the political activities of federal employees.

Public Citizen on Tuesday requested that the Office of Special Counsel launch a Hatch Act investigation into an Aug. 14 speech that Blanche gave during a Long Island campaign rally attended by police officers for Bruce Blakeman, a Republican running for New York governor. OSC enforces the Hatch Act.

While most civil servants are permitted to participate in partisan political campaigns, “further restricted employees” — generally those at intelligence and enforcement agencies — are not.

“Though Blanche did not specifically say ‘vote for,’ his participation in the campaign rally along with President Donald Trump constitutes an active endorsement of the Republican candidate,” wrote Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen.

Specifically, Public Citizen said that Blanche is classified as a “further restricted employee” under DOJ policy. Additionally, civil servants are barred under the Hatch Act from engaging in political activities in their official capacity. The organization said that Blanche was identified at the rally as the attorney general.

A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive that: “This is a politically-motivated complaint designed to weaponize the Hatch Act against the Attorney General for his support of law enforcement. The complaint is baseless, and it will not stop DOJ from continuing to work with our state and local law enforcement partners to keep Americans safe.”

An OSC spokesperson said that the agency has no comment. The Senate recently confirmed Charles Baldis, a former GOP Senate staffer, as the new special counsel.

Several other administration officials have been the subject of Hatch Act complaints.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington accused Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick of running afoul of the Hatch Act for encouraging voters to not support Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayor race. The nonprofit also contended that Labor Department inspector general Anthony D’Esposito broke the ethics rules over apparent actions he took while in office to prepare for a congressional run.

Penalties for violating the Hatch Act include removal from federal service, a grade reduction, ban from federal employment for up to five years, suspension or a civil penalty of up to $1,000.

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Getting a simple FOIA request from OPM shouldn’t be this hard

Al Shaw, ProPublica — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:37:35 -0400

I file a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests. I’ve been requesting staff lists from both Trump administrations, and I have tracked thousands of federal political appointees in order to publish financial disclosures in searchable databases.

Much of that data was sourced from the Office of Personnel Management, which maintains a trove of information about who works in the federal government. But that agency’s FOIA department was thrown into chaos as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fanned out across federal agencies to cut employees in early 2025.

Getting records from the agency has since become an increasingly Kafkaesque process, one that in early July of this year bounced me between three different seemingly abandoned email inboxes and two web portals. Aside from the fact that my once-routine requests now languish for months, just asking for documents has become its own kind of shell game.

“They just let the whole Privacy team go,” a now-former FOIA specialist at OPM told me by email in February 2025, referring to public records office staff. The specialist was cut the next day.

Here’s how the process worked at most agencies before the Trump administration and DOGE destroyed the offices that managed these requests: You would send a simple email with a text description of the documents you want. That’s it.

It didn’t mean you would get the records in the most timely manner, or would get the records you wanted at all. But it was a simple process, and it often worked.

According to OPM data, more than 600 government information specialists (staffers who administer FOIA and the Privacy Act) have resigned or been fired since the start of the second Trump administration. Within OPM itself, 12 information specialists left, seven of whom were laid off. (There was one new hire in that time period.)

Reached by phone, the former FOIA specialist told me the cuts made the office less efficient, less able to perform its function and threatened the statutory laws they are required to fulfill.

At the end of the 2025 fiscal year, over 1,600 FOIA requests were still in OPM’s backlog, seven times more than at the end of fiscal year 2024. The average processing time for a simple request at the agency slipped to over 84 days — twice as long as the year before.

Indeed, I noticed my records requests were taking longer, and they were increasingly steered toward web portals. Such was the case in early July, when I attempted to submit a request to OPM for human resources data. When I clicked “log in,” I was confronted with a message reading, “Something went wrong while processing your action. Please contact admin@ains.com for assistance if the problem persists.”

I emailed the address, but the message bounced back to me. AINS, it turned out, was no longer the name of the company — it is now known as Opexus. Opexus has received more than $50 million in federal contracts, according to a Bloomberg report, and has come under fire for lax cybersecurity standards after two of its employees were indicted for deleting and compromising government data. (One pleaded guilty in April, and the other was convicted in May). On its website, Opexus claims to process FOIA requests for 80% of federal institutions.

OPM’s website still listed contact information for a FOIA public liaison, someone who is supposed to help the public understand the records process and assist with requests. When I emailed the address, I got an automated response reading, “I am no longer at OPM. If you need assistance with a FOIA matter, please contact FOIA@opm.gov.”

So I did. I immediately got another automated message. This one told me to submit my request to the National FOIA Portal, a cross-government site that allows you to submit a FOIA request to any agency.

So I did that, too. Afterward, I finally got a response that acknowledged my request — from the same OPM portal that was throwing an error any time I tried to use it.

Stymied by the lack of response from the agency itself, I reached out to Opexus support, explaining that I was a FOIA requester and that the OPM site wasn’t working. I got a response from someone named Stephen, saying, “I have escalated this issue to our engineering team.” When I followed up a few days later, Stephen said, “I have identified the root cause of the issue and am currently working with the OPM administrator to implement the necessary fix.” Further questions on the support ticket thread weren’t answered.

On July 23, 13 days after I had filed the support ticket with Opexus, I got another response asking me again what error I was getting. I told them I was still getting the same message. A few hours later, I tried logging back in. The site was fixed.

In a statement, Opexus said it became aware of the issue on July 10 when a customer support case was opened. Incidentally, that was the day I had opened one. The statement noted access to the portal was restored on July 23, and that the issue did not prevent OPM from receiving FOIA requests through alternate submission methods. The company said that “there is no evidence that customer data was accessed, lost, or compromised” and that the issue was isolated to OPM’s portal.

The statement added that Opexus recognizes “how important uninterrupted access to FOIA request systems is for the public.”

OPM did not respond to a request for comment.

I’m still waiting for the records.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story first ran in Dispatches, our weekly newsletter from our reporters about their recent investigations.

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