Government Executive - Oversight

Newest inspector general nominees show shift from overtly political backgrounds

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:55:04 -0400

On one of the first days of his second term, Donald Trump fired 17 agency inspectors general. And most of the president’s picks who have been confirmed to lead the watchdog offices previously worked in his first or second administration, raising concerns from good government groups about their ability to perform independent oversight of federal programs.

Trump’s latest IG nominees, however, generally have experience working in an IG office and appear to be more typical picks for the nonpartisan watchdog role.

Justice Department

Trump nominated Don Berthiaume, a career IG employee, to lead the DOJ IG office, where he is currently serving as a senior advisor.

The president tapped Berthiaume as the acting IG at DOJ from October 2025 through January 2026, but his tenure was cut short by rules that limit how long an individual can serve in an acting position.

Specifically, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act generally restricts officials from filling a role in an acting capacity to no more than 210 days after a vacancy occurs. The position at DOJ opened up in June 2025 when former DOJ IG Michael Horowitz left to become the IG for the Federal Reserve.

The deputy DOJ IG, William Blier, is currently performing the duties of the IG.

If confirmed, Berthiaume will face several politically sensitive challenges. Lawyers for a DOJ whistleblower in March accused the IG office of not investigating multiple misconduct allegations. And the DOJ watchdog in April announced that it would audit the department’s compliance with the law mandating the release of government files related to the deceased sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.

But Mark Lee Greenblatt — former Interior Department IG who was fired by Trump and who has been critical of the president’s IG selections — praised Berthiaume’s nomination.

“In my experience of working literally next to [Berthiaume] for years on very sensitive political cases, he showed to me that he is a straight shooter,” Greenblatt said. “When compared with some of the IG nominees that President Trump has put forward in other significant positions, this [nomination] is — from my perspective — a home run.”

Education Department

Like Berthiaume, Trump’s pick to serve as Education IG — Heidi Semann — comes from the IG community and had a stint as acting IG.

The president in July 2025 replaced acting Education IG René Rocque, who is also the office’s deputy, with Semann. The swap came after Rocque notified Congress that investigators had “experienced unreasonable denials and repeated delays” from the department during an investigation into the administration’s workforce reductions.

In December 2025, however, Semann’s tenure as acting IG ended, and she returned to her position as a senior special agent at the Federal Reserve OIG. A spokesperson for the Education OIG confirmed to Government Executive that this was due to time limits on acting officials in the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

Mark Priebe, who replaced Semann as acting and is still in the position, was a senior official in the Education OIG who appears to have shared social media posts supporting Trump.

Similarly, Greenblatt argued that Semann, given her oversight experience, is a “marked improvement” from Trump’s past IG nominees. But he still has some concerns.

“She seems to be having this meteoric rise from obscurity to an incredibly important sensitive role, so I think that does raise a question in my mind,” he said. “But since she’s coming from the OIG community, and with an oversight background, then hopefully she is coming to this position with that fair, objective and independent mindset.”

Housing and Urban Development Department

At the end of April, Trump nominated Jeffrey Ledbetter of Virginia to be IG at HUD. Neither the White House, the HUD OIG or Republicans or Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, where his nomination has been referred, responded to a request to confirm who Ledbetter is or otherwise provide biographical information.

The president had selected Jeremy Ellis, who has more than two decades of investigative experience, as his HUD IG nominee, but that nomination was withdrawn in September 2025.

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VA security personnel aren’t detecting knives or booze, according to a watchdog report assessing medical facility security

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:04:16 -0400

Police officers who guard Veterans Affairs Department medical facilities failed to address security issues in a majority of covert tests conducted by the Government Accountability Office, which also determined that VA leaders have not fully implemented federal building security best practices.

The report, which was published on Wednesday, found that:

VA staff at all 30 locations that were examined failed to detect a multi-tool with a prohibited knife blade. Investigators noted that only two of the buildings had metal detectors: one of them was not in use and in the other case the device set the detector off but officers did not act on it.
In 25 out of 26 tests, VA employees did not notice or respond to an undercover GAO investigator who was drinking from a bottle that appeared to contain alcohol in a waiting room, even though guards were nearby in more than a quarter of the cases.
At eight of 16 facilities, investigators were able to enter nonpublic spaces, such as offices, treatment rooms and a blood draw lab.

In 2025, GAO similarly reported that contracted guards for agencies governmentwide failed to detect prohibited items in about half of its covert tests.

The VA has more than 4,300 police officers, physical security specialists and investigators as well as roughly 800 contract security guards.

VA’s inspector general found that in fiscal 2025 police officers were the most frequently reported severe nonclinical occupational staffing shortage in the department, with 58% of medical facilities saying they didn’t have enough security personnel.

Quinn Slaven, VA’s press secretary, said by email to Government Executive that officials have worked to address the issue by collaborating with the Office of Personnel Management to reclassify department police officers so that they can receive higher pay. He also said that the VA has consolidated law enforcement operations under one office, so that officers aren’t reporting to multiple different medical center directors.

GAO also faulted the VA for not adhering to Interagency Security Committee risk management standards for federal buildings. Specifically, officials are not consistently documenting why they make certain security decisions considering available resources or measuring the performance of protective measures.

The watchdog recommended that VA enact the government facility security guidelines.

“By fully implementing this standard, VA will be better able to make informed decisions, effectively allocate resources and prioritize security efforts at its medical facilities,” they wrote. “In addition, fully implementing this standard could help VA ensure it has appropriate security at its medical facilities to create a safe environment for veterans and VA staff.”

In the new report, GAO also found that about 98% of the approximately 74,700 crimes reported by the VA police in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 were nonviolent.

GAO said in the report that the VA did not provide comments on the investigation. Agencies typically offer feedback on investigations by the watchdog that officials then incorporate into the report. Slaven, however, told Government Executive that the VA did submit comments but that GAO didn’t include them.

In response, a GAO spokesperson said that VA submitted a message agreeing with the recommendations in the report after it had been sent to the senator who requested the investigation.

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Watchdog recommends nearly 100 ways for agencies to save tens of billions

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:31:29 -0400

The Government Accountability Office on Tuesday released its annual report highlighting duplicative federal programs and opportunities to promote effectiveness and efficiency across agencies. Officials estimated that implementing their new and past open recommendations could save more than $100 billion.

Some of the new 97 recommendations for lawmakers and agencies include:

Officials should consolidate mission-support services (e.g. payroll and travel) among agencies, which GAO reported could save tens of millions of dollars over three years. Specifically, the watchdog recommended that the Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration improve data collection with respect to the effectiveness of shared services.
The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs should identify more opportunities to share healthcare resources, which could reduce fragmentation and also save tens of millions of dollars annually.
FBI should lead the creation of a government-wide anti-scam strategy to spur collaboration, as 13 different agencies work to prevent scams.

Investigators reported that, as of March, agencies had fully or partially addressed 1,662 (77%) of recommendations that GAO has made in these annual reports for the last 16 years, yielding about $774.3 billion in financial benefits. Officials acknowledged, however, that this is a “rough estimate based on a variety of sources that considered different time periods and used different data sources, assumptions and methodologies.”

In the latest report, GAO also flagged past recommendations that remain unimplemented including:

Establishing an inventory of federal programs, which includes funding and performance information, to help identify duplication and overlap. The watchdog found in a March report that such an inventory created by OMB is missing statutorily required information.
Setting up a process to identify and remove ineligible family members from the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, which the watchdog said could save more than $1 billion over nine years. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was enacted in July 2025, included a requirement to fulfill such a recommendation, but the Office of Personnel Management hasn’t implemented it yet.
Improving the IRS’ enforcement efforts. Congressional Democrats in 2022 approved nearly $80 billion for the tax agency, in part, to enhance tax collections, but lawmakers since then have rescinded more than two-thirds of that funding.

The House Republican fiscal 2027 legislative branch appropriations bill would cut GAO’s funding by nearly 25%. Congress in fiscal 2026 held the watchdog’s funding level flat despite an attempt by the House GOP to halve it. The Trump administration has criticized GAO for issuing several findings that officials illegally withheld congressionally approved spending.

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Federal discipline was never supposed to be punitive. The MSPB appeal framework reflects that

Justin Schnitzer — Tue, 12 May 2026 06:00:00 -0400

There is a legal principle embedded in the federal disciplinary system that most federal employees never hear about, and that most federal managers are not taught, even though it is the single most important concept for understanding how the Merit Systems Protection Board evaluates adverse actions.

Federal discipline is supposed to be rehabilitative, not punitive.

This is not an attorney's argument or an advocacy position. It is the doctrinal foundation of the Douglas factors framework established in Douglas v. Veterans Administration, 5 MSPR 280 (1981), which remains the controlling standard for penalty review in MSPB cases forty-five years later. The Board's twelve-factor analysis is built on a core question: not "how bad was this," but "does this person have the potential to be rehabilitated into a productive federal employee."

That distinction matters for both managers and employees, and it is worth examining carefully against the current backdrop. For readers who want the structural framework before reading the analysis, this MSPB appeal walkthrough covers how the Douglas factors function within the broader appeal process.

What the Douglas framework actually asks

When an MSPB administrative judge reviews whether a penalty is proportionate, the twelve Douglas factors build a profile of the employee, not just the offense. They include the nature and seriousness of the conduct, the employee's job level, their past disciplinary record, their length of service and prior performance, the potential for rehabilitation, and the existence of mitigating circumstances such as unusual job tensions, personal difficulties, or provocation.

Factor 10, potential for rehabilitation, is where cases are often decided. An employee who accepts responsibility for the conduct, demonstrates understanding of why it was wrong, and shows concrete steps toward not repeating it is signaling rehabilitation. An employee who denies, deflects, or makes false statements during the investigation is signaling the opposite, and that signal carries significant weight with administrative judges.

This framework also requires agencies to impose consistent penalties. Douglas Factor 6 asks whether the penalty is consistent with penalties the agency has imposed on similarly-situated employees for similar conduct. Douglas Factor 7 asks whether the penalty is consistent with the agency's published table of penalties. Agencies that deviate from their own established penalty ranges are required to justify that deviation, and recent precedent has opened more discretion for judges to mitigate feds' punishments, reinforcing the proportionality review.

What the current caseload reflects

The MSPB received 20,335 initial appeals in fiscal year 2025, approximately four times its normal annual volume, according to the Board's Annual Performance Report published April 3, 2026. The surge was driven largely by probationary terminations and reduction-in-force actions. Of the 9,050 cases processed at the regional and field office level in FY 2025, only 55.8 percent were resolved within 120 days.

That caseload volume does not change the legal framework. The Douglas factors review applies regardless of the number of cases on the docket. What it does change is the practical context in which managers and HR professionals are operating. Adverse actions issued at volume, without individualized Douglas factors analysis, without consistency review, without consideration of rehabilitation potential, create appeals that are more likely to generate either Board reversals or settlements on unfavorable terms.

Settlement rates have been declining for years. It has been becoming rarer for federal agencies and employees to resolve adverse action disputes through settlement, and the FY 2025 data confirms the trend has continued. The legal test for penalty proportionality is not relaxed because the agency is processing a large number of actions simultaneously. Administrative judges apply the same framework to mass actions that they apply to individual ones.

The reply stage as the first checkpoint

For employees facing proposed adverse actions, the procedural structure gives them a meaningful opportunity to engage the Douglas framework before the case reaches the Board. Under 5 U.S.C. § 7513(b), employees have the right to reply in writing and orally to the deciding official before the final action is taken. An effective reply frames the employee's conduct in the rehabilitative context, demonstrating accountability, context, and a clear case for proportionality under the Douglas factors. In my practice, that framing gives the deciding official a substantive basis for reducing or withdrawing the proposed action.

What federal managers should understand

Managers who initiate proposed adverse actions under the assumption that the Board will simply defer to the agency's judgment are operating on outdated assumptions. The Federal Circuit affirmed 91 percent of MSPB decisions reviewed on the merits in FY 2025, which means the Board's decisions are robust to appellate review. But the Board will apply the Douglas factors to whatever the agency proposes, and penalties that are disproportionate, inconsistent with established tables, or unsupported by evidence of the employee's rehabilitation potential are subject to mitigation. The MSPB has long advocated nontraditional approaches to discipline for precisely this reason.

The most defensible adverse action from the agency's perspective is one that can demonstrate, against each applicable Douglas factor, that the penalty selected is proportionate, consistent, and based on individualized assessment. That standard is more demanding than simply documenting the misconduct.

The rehabilitative framework is not an idealistic legal theory. It is the law that governs whether the penalty your agency imposed will survive review.

Justin Schnitzer founded The Law Office of Justin Schnitzer, a Washington, D.C. federal employment law practice focused on MSPB appeals, federal EEOC matters, and adverse action defense. His analysis of federal workforce policy has appeared in Forbes, US News & World Report, NBC News, Newsweek, and the ABA Journal.

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The number of feds in tax debt spiked during the pandemic

Eric Katz — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:03:01 -0400

The rate of federal employees who fail to pay their taxes on time has grown in recent years, according to a new audit, though the Internal Revenue Service is hopeful it can soon shrink the figure.

The federal workforce still overwhelmingly pays its taxes on time, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found in a new report, though the delinquency rate has grown from 4.9% in 2021 to 6.9% in 2024. There were 215,000 federal workers who had outstanding tax bills as of 2024, a 45% jump from 2021. They collectively owed $2.1 billion, up from $1.5 billion three years prior.

IRS officials attributed much of the increase to a pause of various collection efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The IRS began a phased-in resumption of the levy program in August 2024 and anticipates that the delinquency rates will decrease in the coming years,” the inspector general said.

Still, the auditors implored IRS to do a better job ensuring federal employees pay their taxes on time. IRS is prohibited from sharing its list of non-compliant feds with other agencies, a ban the IG suggested the Treasury Department lobby Congress to change.

“If taxpayers (i.e., non-federal employees) are aware that federal employees are not timely satisfying their tax obligations, it may impact their willingness to comply with their own tax matters,” the IG said.

The watchdog noted that Treasury has an obligation to hold employees accountable for tax noncompliance and its rate for such workers is just 2.4%.

IRS and Treasury last year collaborated to mail 427,000 notices to federal employees and retirees delinquent on their taxes, which led to nearly 65,000 of those individuals making at least some payment on their tax bills. Agency officials said that was a one-time initiative and it would not be sending additional notices.

The tax agency in 1993 launched a program to specifically track and identify federal workers who fall behind on their tax bills. The number of employees working on that program dropped in half last year as part of IRS’ overall effort to shrink its workforce. Still, the agency said it has introduced additional enforcement of delinquent federal workers and is now prioritizing that population in its collection activity two days per week instead of one day per quarter.

As of 2024, there were 572,000 combined federal employees retirees who were not up to date on their taxes. That figure jumped by 43% since 2021 despite the overall population slightly declining. They owe $6.3 billion in taxes, a 32% increase.

About 50,000 current employees failed to file a tax return for multiple years. More than 1,000 employees are delinquent on their taxes for at least six years. The IG said it referred the 122 federal workers who were at least eight years behind to IRS’ Criminal Investigations division.

Federal employee advocates have noted over the years that the civil servants maintain a delinquency rate far lower than that of the U.S. population.

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More than 3-in-4 allegations of sexual assault against federal prison staff are going unresolved

Eric Katz — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:41:57 -0400

Allegations of sexual abuse against staff at federal prisons are overwhelmingly left unresolved after the Bureau of Prisons is unable to draw a conclusion on whether such incidents occurred, according to a new report that found the federal Bureau of Prisons is frequently ill-equipped to handle those investigations.

Allegations of rape and sexual misconduct against federal corrections officers by inmates have spiked in recent years, the Government Accountability Office found in its review of enforcement of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), and the bureau is in many ways failing to implement the law in the way Congress intended.

From 2014 through 2022, federal inmates logged nearly 4,000 complaints of sexual abuse against prison staff. Just 9% of those were substantiated by BOP, though 77% saw investigations end inconclusively. The agency proved the incidents did not occur in just six cases, or about one-tenth of 1%.

A similar trend emerged from sexual abuse allegedly committed by incarcerated individuals, with 81% of those cases reaching inconclusive findings.

GAO separately found federal prison guards faced around 3,000 allegations of sexual abuse from 2020 through 2024, a significant uptick in incident rate from prior years. From 2014 through 2022, BOP averaged 433 allegations against its staff per year. In 2023 and 2024, that spiked to 857 per year.

When an allegation of sexual abuse is made, the bureau deploys an evidence recovery team for and a local nurse conducts a rape kit if the alleged event had just occured. Employees said, however, that they often learn of allegations well after the fact, such as after an inmate transfers from a different facility.

GAO reported last year that BOP’s Office of Internal Affairs had 12,153 open allegations in its employees misconduct caseload, though the agency said most were not related to PREA violations. More than one-third of those cases had been open for at least three years. GAO noted the bureau has ramped up its efforts to address the backlog, including by deploying strike teams of investigators to facilities with particularly large caseloads.

Still, employees told the auditors that they have insufficient staffing for responding to allegations of sexual abuse, including a shortatge of investigators. Longstanding personnel shortages at the agency have led to less general supervision that in turn allows misconduct to fester, officials told GAO. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Trump signed into law last year included $3 billion for BOP staffing, though criminal justice reform advocates have faulted the Trump administration for cutting PREA grants last year.

Abusers also employ tactics to avoid repercussions. Most of the corrections officers with whom GAO spoke said abusers know where they can go to evade cameras and some said the video quality is poor or not retained for a sufficient amount of time. Employees also said investigations against staff can take time, often years, to complete.

Corrections officers told GAO that false allegations of sexual abuse are prevalent and waste resources and tarnish the credibility of those reporting real incidents. Incarcerated individuals told the auditors that their fellow inmates make false accusations against prison staff as a form of retribution.

Still, corrections officers overwhelmingly told GAO they “would not hesitate to report sexual abuse perpetrated by employees against incarcerated individuals.”

PREA sought to establish a “zero-tolerance policy” for rape in U.S. prisons while tasking the Justice Department with instituting national standards for preventing, investigating and tracking such incidents. GAO noted sexual abuse “remains a significant problem” in federal prisons despite some progress under the law. The auditors titled a blog post accompanying their report “The Heinous Crimes Haunting Federal Prisons.”

Facilities that have been found to be fully compliant with the law have maintained the highest incident rates of sexual abuse in the country, GAO found. PREA requires ongoing audits of federal prison facilities, but GAO said current practice fails to detect ongoing sexual abuse. When the bureau contracts auditors for those investigations, it does not ensure they meet established requirements and they do not always have access to key documentation.

“Sexual assault is a heinous crime that can have lasting, harmful effects on survivors,” GAO said. “The issues identified through this report highlight that not all correctional facilities are meeting the intent of PREA.”

GAO cited BOP for a slew of additional failures, including its decision to only focus on cultural issues at women’s facilities and not men’s. It noted the bureau does not publish or analyze uniform data across the bureau to identify trends.

Jolene Lauria, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for administration, said BOP agreed that it must assess its approach on PREA enforcement and vowed to implement all of GAO’s recommendations. Various hiring initiatives will address staffing shortages that lead to coverage issues, officials said, and the agency will look at bringing on staff with specific experience in data analysis. It will also ensure the third-party investigators who conduct PREA audits have access to the documentation they need and review their training and guidance materials to enhance detection of ongoing sexual abuse.

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Agencies doled out $186B in improper payments last year, GAO says

Natalie Alms — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:48:58 -0400

The federal government made at least $186 billion in improper payments in fiscal 2025, according to a report released Monday by Congress’ watchdog.

The Government Accountability Office’s new estimate comes as the Trump administration continues to doggedly pursue its “war on fraud” to hunt out fraudulent government spending.

The latest numbers offer a point-in-time look at how the government is doing with preventing payments that shouldn’t have been made or were made in the incorrect amount. The category is broader than fraud, which is defined by willful misrepresentation. Although the majority of the $186 billion evaluated by GAO are overpayments, at least $10 billion of the total is money that should’ve been sent out, but wasn’t.

The government’s improper payments total is up by about $24 billion from the prior fiscal year, although that’s largely because of changes in what programs reported data, GAO said. The watchdog audited the improper payment data from 15 agencies’ financial statements across 64 programs.

Most of the improper payments are concentrated in five programs, GAO found, including Medicare, Medicaid, the earned income tax credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The Trump administration has been zeroing in on fraud in Medicare and Medicaid already, as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz announced last week that the Trump administration will require all states to revalidate Medicaid providers.

Oz has also announced state-level Medicaid probes, mostly of blue states, as part of his effort to stamp out fraud, although that rollout hasn’t been flawless. Last month, CMS admitted to an error in the fraud analysis of Medicaid in New York that it used to justify the scrutiny into the state program.

The White House is also working across federal agencies to comb through government programs as part of Trump’s anti-fraud task force being led by Vice President JD Vance.

The crackdown is happening as midterms loom, with voters saying that they’re concerned about healthcare affordability.

Critics of the administration’s anti-fraud work say the administration is using the issue as a pretext for political goals and that false claims and the dismantling of government watchdogs are worsening the problem.

“As someone who has spent my career fighting fraud, I welcome any renewed attention on ferreting out fraud,” Mark Lee Greenblatt, formerly the inspector general at Interior Department, told Nextgov/FCW. But he said some of the administration’s moves have been “puzzling.”

“They’ve proposed slashing OIG budgets markedly. And that is counterproductive to the fight against fraud,” said Greenblatt. “If you want to fight fraud, fund the fraud-fighters.”

Trump fired Greenblatt and about 20 other watchdogs soon after taking office last year. He also issued nearly three dozen pardons and commutations for people accused of fraud last year.

Lawmakers have also taken on the mantle of fraud fighting. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is planning to mark up nine bills tomorrow focused on the issue. Among them is a proposal to create a permanent anti-fraud data platform for OIGs. Oversight officials have long recommended that lawmakers improve data sharing within the government.

The bills being considered are a “huge bright spot,” Linda Miller, an anti-fraud expert who worked at GAO for years, told Nextgov/FCW. They remove “a ton of barriers that I have been talking about for a decade.”

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Catch me if you can’t: How fraudsters are outpacing the government

Jordan Burris — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

For years, conversations about government fraud have focused on scale. The numbers are staggering. The Government Accountability Office estimates between $233 billion and $521 billion is lost to fraud annually but if we say the quiet part out loud that estimate is far too low. The reality that emerged from a recent cross-government roundtable of federal leaders shines a light on the urgency in this moment that is greater than any single number.

Fraud is no longer just large. It is fast.

Today’s fraud landscape is defined by speed, adaptability, and coordination at a level government systems were not built to match. What once took months to orchestrate can now happen in days, or even hours. As detailed in the report from the roundtable, in one documented case, fraud actors used artificial intelligence to generate more than 24,000 synthetic identities and launch nearly 36,000 attacks within a matter of weeks, many within just 48 hours of identity creation. That velocity makes it increasingly hard to keep up with the fraudsters.

This is no longer a question of fixing gaps in existing systems. It is a structural mismatch between how quickly fraud evolves, how slowly public sector controls adapt, and how the public sector continues to implement yesterday’s approaches to stopping fraud to a next generation problem. Programs designed to update annually by looking backwards are facing threats that iterate in real time and not as slowly as the federal budget process.

At the same time, something else is happening beneath the surface. The signals the government has long relied on to detect fraud are weakening. Identity markers, like consistent email addresses, phone numbers, and device fingerprints, are disappearing as fraudsters deliberately engineer around them. The result is a system where traditional safeguards are not just failing, they are being outpaced. And yet, the most striking takeaway from the roundtable was not the risk. It was the opportunity to do something better.

Prevention Is Finally Within Reach

There is now clear, operational evidence that fraud can be prevented before it happens. Recent efforts across Treasury and oversight bodies show that earlier intervention, backed by better data and modern analytics, can stop improper payments upstream without slowing down services. Prevention and speed are no longer opposing forces. Done right, they reinforce each other.

For decades, the government has relied on a “pay and chase” model. Funds go out quickly, and fraud is identified, prosecuted, and recovered later. But recovery is expensive, slow, and often incomplete. Prevention, by contrast, is immediate and far more effective. The challenge is that government incentives have not fully caught up.

Today, agencies are still rewarded for rapid disbursement and post-payment recovery, even as practitioners and evidence alike show that earlier screening delivers better outcomes. Fixing that misalignment is fundamentally a policy challenge.

The Coordination Problem

That theme emerged most sharply in discussions around federal grants. It is clear there are tools the public sector has available to prevent fraud, some older and many that have yet to be adopted. However, the responsibility, data, and intelligence is spread across agencies, states, and systems that were never designed to work together. When billions of dollars move through decentralized structures, even small coordination gaps can create significant exposure. Closing those gaps requires orchestrating what already exists, not reinventing the system.

And there are real reasons for optimism. Data-sharing authorities are expanding. Tools like Treasury’s Do Not Pay system are proving their value, identifying and preventing millions in improper payments with strong returns on investment. (This strategy is only scratching the surface of what is needed.) Perhaps most importantly, there is growing bipartisan consensus that prevention must happen earlier in the payment lifecycle. The Administration’s recent Executive Order on Fraud demonstrates commitment at the highest levels.

The Window to Act

The question now is whether that momentum can be sustained and scaled. Because fraud actors are not waiting. They are already adapting to new controls, leveraging artificial intelligence, global infrastructure, and increasingly sophisticated identity strategies. The window to respond is now measured in days or months, rather than years.

The takeaway from this roundtable is that the path forward is clearer than ever.

Move prevention upstream before the payment goes out.
Treat data and fraud risk intelligence sharing as essential and find the right way to do it.
Align incentives with outcomes that reward dollars never lost, not just dollars recovered.

Fraud is evolving quickly. The real test is whether government can evolve just as fast.

Jordan Burris is the Head of Public Sector at Socure, an industry-leading digital identity verification provider. Burris was previously Chief of Staff to the Federal CIO at the White House during the first Trump Administration.

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Severe staffing cuts at GSA are harming agencies across government, watchdog says

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:12:13 -0400

The General Services Administration conducted staff cuts in 2025 without analyzing what skills it needed in order to fulfill its mission managing federal buildings, the top federal watchdog found in a new report, leaving the agency scrambling to address ensuing gaps in service.

GSA’s Public Buildings Service oversees about 8,500 owned and leased government properties. As part of the Trump administration’s push to reduce the number of federal employees, the division went from more than 5,600 employees to approximately 3,100 over the course of 2025.

The agency achieved these reductions mainly through voluntary separation incentives (such as the deferred resignation program) and layoffs. Investigators noted, however, that GSA in September 2025 rescinded nearly 400 of the PBS reduction in force notices.

The Government Accountability Office flagged several issues with how GSA conducted the workforce reductions and broader reorganization:

Officials did not develop performance measures to gauge the success of the overhaul.
PBS leadership communicated with stakeholders and employees about these changes generally after, rather than before, they were implemented.
The agency does not have a “systematic plan” to monitor that the reforms are being enacted.
Officials conducted an analysis to determine how many personnel with certain skills were needed to fill gaps in the agency only after staff cuts had already taken place.

“The Public Buildings Service reduced staff first and then assessed workforce gaps retroactively,” investigators wrote. “Without strategic workforce planning that carefully considers long-term staffing plan and associated personnel costs, a skills gap between the agency’s workforce capacity and its mission-related activities may result in reduced or disrupted service delivery.”

One agency that relies on GSA reported that its employees are no longer certain who their point of contact is at PBS. Officials from another agency told GAO that they have had to extend project timelines due to a reduction in the number of employees who conduct cost estimates before a building can be offloaded. The Trump administration has prioritized selling underutilized federal properties.

GAO recommended that GSA set performance metrics for the reorganization, continuously solicit and incorporate feedback from stakeholders, monitor implementation of the reforms and address skills gaps in PBS.

GSA Administrator Edward Forst agreed with the recommendations in a letter attached to the report and reported some progress in implementing them, including establishing new agency performance goals and initiating employee pulse surveys.

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Inspectors general targeted for funding cuts in Trump’s FY27 budget

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:09:18 -0400

In 2025, Donald Trump fired nearly 20 inspectors general and replaced acting IGs at five agencies. The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that has been critical of the president’s federal workforce reforms, in an analysis published on Tuesday argued that the administration is seeking to further weaken the oversight offices through the budget process.

Based on the fiscal 2027 budget request, which was released earlier this month, researchers found that Cabinet department IGs would receive an average of 12% less in funding than they did in fiscal 2024 (the last full fiscal year of the Biden administration.) The IGs at the departments of Interior and Justice would each be cut by 28%, which are the steepest declines.

“Audits and investigations require time and resources,” the Partnership wrote. “A 28% budget reduction does not simply mean doing the same work more efficiently. It means doing less of it. Fewer audits conducted, fewer investigations opened and fewer recommendations made to agencies — and longer timelines for the work that does get done.”

Congress rejected many of Trump’s fiscal 2026 requests to significantly cut agency funding.

Administration officials, according to the Partnership, project an average 9% reduction in staffing at Cabinet IGs, which is on top of a 10% average workforce cut at the agencies that occurred in 2025. Likewise, the Public Citizen nonprofit found in a March report that the overall number of IG employees has shrunk by about 12% as a result of the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the civil service.

While the number of vacant IG positions increased after Trump’s mass firings, the Senate has only confirmed eight of the president’s IG nominees — most of whom previously worked in Trump’s first or second administration.

Cheryl Mason — the IG for the Veterans Affairs Department, who previously served as a senior adviser to VA Secretary Doug Collins — in March was elected as the chairperson of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. The Trump administration had blocked fiscal 2026 funding for the watchdogs’ central group but backtracked after pressure from Senate Republicans.

Partnership researchers reported that the five IG offices with the deepest proposed cuts across budget and staffing do not have permanent leadership.

“An office operating under an acting inspector general, with a staff 21-35% smaller than it was two years ago and a budget facing further cuts, is not simply a leaner operation,” they wrote. “It is a fundamentally hampered one.”

The Project on Government Oversight nonprofit argued that cutting IG offices ultimately hurts the country’s financial outlook, pointing to data that every dollar spent on IGs in fiscal 2024 yielded $18 as a result of their work to root out fraud, waste and abuse.

“Investing in inspectors general invests in effective government,” said Caitlin MacNeal, POGO’s communications director, in a statement to Government Executive. “Firing inspectors general and slashing their budgets undermines accountability."

Mark Lee Greenblatt, who was IG at the Interior Department before he was fired by Trump, contended that the proposal to cut spending on the watchdog offices contravened the administration’s effort to combat fraud.

“If the goal is to fight fraud, the IGs should be getting larger budgets – not smaller,” he said in a statement to Government Executive.

Administration officials have previously said that IGs have become “corrupt, partisan and in some cases, have lied to the public.” During his first term, Trump fired the IG whose notification to Congress led to his first impeachment.

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House Dems: OPM ‘omitted’ employee departures from retirement backlog investigation

Erich Wagner — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:10:42 -0400

House Democrats on Monday suggested that the Office of Personnel Management has not been entirely forthcoming in responding to their oversight requests over the federal retirement backlog, which has ballooned during Trump’s second term to more than 50,000 pending cases.

Last December, a group of House lawmakers led by Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., requested that the federal government’s dedicated HR agency provide information regarding delays within the federal retirement process impacting tens of thousands of former employees who left federal service last year. As of March 31, the retirement backlog sat at 55,681 pending cases, down from a peak of 65,237 cases the previous month.

But the lawmakers, in a new letter to OPM Monday, said that the HR agency’s previous response was incomplete. While the agency noted the loss of 35 customer center representatives, it failed to mention a much larger exodus from within OPM’s Retirement Services division.

“A January 30 letter we received rom the deputy inspector general of OPM raised concerns associated with staff reductions across the agency resulting from Trump-implemented staffing initiatives such as the deferred resignation program, reductions in force and the termination of probationary staff,” lawmakers wrote. “[Specifically], the IG cites data from its November 2025 report indicating the loss of more than 100 staff in the Retirement Services division due to the deferred resignation program. The Office of the IG reiterated concerns that these losses would compound existing delays in retirement processing.”

Walkinshaw and his colleagues also bemoaned that while OPM has touted the launch of a governmentwide online retirement application in its efforts to reduce the retirement backlog, it failed to provide information about what percentage of retirement applications are being handled by the new system.

“To be clear, we are supportive of efforts to modernize OPM’s retirement application process and hope to see continued progress on the use and implementation of ORA,” they wrote. “What we do not support is the use of rhetoric about modernization efforts to obscure the existing backlog of retirement applications for federal employees, many of whom were pushed out by the Trump administration’s workforce reduction policies.”

In a statement to Government Executive, OPM spokeswoman McLaurine Pinover said the backlog of pending claims has declined “significantly from its recent peak.” The agency processed 22,237 claims in March, bringing the backlog down by 14%. But the current inventory remains roughly 20,000 claims higher than its previous peak—36,000 claims in 2022, as OPM began digging out from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“OPM is making steady progress reducing the retirement backlog after a surge in applications earlier this year, with inventory declining significantly from its recent peak,” she said. “Many delays occur before cases reach OPM, as retirement packages must first be completed by agencies and payroll providers before adjudication can begin. Once cases arrive at OPM, most retirees receive interim payments on average seven days within submission of their retirement application, so they have income while their claims are finalized. Interim pay accounts for 80% of their full annuity payment.”

Pinover did not respond to questions regarding the apparent omission of data regarding the Retirement Services workforce from the agency’s initial response to lawmakers.

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VA’s former EHR lead indicted for concealing contractor gifts

Alexandra Kelley — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:49:40 -0400

A senior executive working within the Veterans Affairs Department was charged with failing to disclose a slew of different gifts given to him by contractors working with the agency on its health records modernization, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday.

John Windom served as the executive director at the Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization within the VA from 2017 to 2021.

The Justice Department alleges that, while working on the $16 billion acquisition and deployment of the VA’s new electronic health records solution, Windom accepted a number of gifts, including thousands of dollars of cash, casino chips, gift cards and other items from contractors while helming the project.

Windom failed to report the gifts, which were both given to him and allegedly demanded by him during his tenure helming the VA office. Notably, the indictment states that, based on his previous employee training, Windom was “fully aware” of ethics laws that prohibited him from accepting gifts from contractors working with the VA.

The indictment charges him with concealment of material facts, false statements and falsification of a record or document following his failure to report the gifts.

“As alleged, the defendant exploited his senior position for personal gain and concealed gifts and financial relationships that created serious conflicts of interest in the health care of our nation’s veterans,” said U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro. “Such conduct is not only a betrayal of the public trust — it undermines confidence in the institutions dedicated to serving those who have sacrificed for this country. Our office will continue to aggressively investigate and prosecute public corruption wherever it occurs, and we remain steadfast in our commitment to protecting the integrity of the programs that support America’s veterans.”

Penalties for each charge vary. The charge of falsification of records and documents carries a maximum of 20 years in prison, and making false statements carries a maximum of 5 years. Both additionally carry potential financial penalties.

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Inspector general group to be led by former Trump administration adviser

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:24:16 -0400

Updated at 10:00 a.m. ET March 26

A former Trump administration official who is now serving as a department inspector general will soon lead a central group for the watchdogs that the president has previously sought to defund.

The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency on Tuesday announced that Veterans Affairs IG Cheryl Mason has been elected as its next chairperson.

Her tenure will last from April 6 through the end of the calendar year to finish out the current chair’s term. CIGIE will hold another election later this year for the next leader whose two-year term will begin on Jan. 1, 2027.

CIGIE chairs are selected by the more than 70 IGs across the federal government.

Mason was confirmed as an IG by the Senate along party lines in summer 2025. Democrats and good government groups questioned her ability to provide independent oversight of the department because she previously served as a senior adviser to VA Secretary Doug Collins.

She will replace Tammy Hull, the IG for the U.S. Postal Service, who has been serving as acting chair of CIGIE since January 2025.

The Washington Post reported that the CIGIE chair race was uncontested and that Hull was not interested in the position after the Trump administration blocked fiscal 2026 funding for the group. Officials reversed that decision, however, after pressure from Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Still, the news outlet found that CIGIE is now required to request funding every quarter from Trump officials.

“The administration is putting more of a thumb on the scale of CIGIE,” said Faith Williams, the director of the Effective and Accountable Government Program at the Project on Government Oversight nonprofit.

Williams argued that Mason’s selection and the quarterly funding approval requirement will “further marginalize” the central watchdog group, which provides training to IG employees and reviews allegations of wrongdoing against the oversight officials.

“CIGIE helps IGs become the most effective they can be, but we also need some kind of back stop for these inspectors general,” she said. “They should be independent from political interference, not necessarily independent from the guidelines and ethics standards that we hold them to.”

Since the start of his second term, Trump has fired 19 IGs, including at the VA. Most of the president’s nominees who have been confirmed to serve in the oversight role have previously worked in his administration.

Mark Lee Greenblatt, one of the IGs who was removed by Trump and a former CIGIE chair, said that “having a former political appointee lead the Council runs the risk of subverting independence in favor of partisanship.”

“American taxpayers can only hope that Ms. Mason appreciates the critical importance of independence and continues the strong track record of prior Council chairs who have led the IG community in an apolitical manner,” he said in a statement to Government Executive.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., has introduced legislation that would prohibit the president from nominating an individual who has previously served as a political appointee in their administration to an IG position. The senator specifically cited Mason’s confirmation as an example of why her measure is necessary.

In a statement to Government Executive, Duckworth also criticized Mason’s selection as CIGIE chair.

“If the goal of this appointment is to curry favor with the Trump administration, IG Mason is certainly a clever pick,” she said. “Unfortunately, all the qualities that make her well suited to appeal to Trump political appointees — namely being one herself who advised Secretary Doug Collins — are the same qualities that render IG Mason unfit to effectively serve as an independent watchdog.”

Additionally, ethics groups and Democratic lawmakers have argued that Labor IG Anthony D’Esposito may have violated the Hatch Act due to reported plans that he is preparing for another congressional run.

And Homeland Security Department IG Joseph Cuffari has recently alleged to Congress that officials have “systematically obstructed” his office’s work.

This article has been updated with Mason’s correct term length and a statement from Mark Lee Greenblatt

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Inspector general’s reported plan to run for Congress is a Hatch Act violation, lawmakers and ethics orgs say

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:09:37 -0400

Good government nonprofits, congressional Democrats and ethics experts have raised concerns that Anthony D’Esposito, the inspector general for the Labor Department, may have violated the law that limits the political activity of federal employees, as he is apparently preparing for another congressional run.

“As a senior official tasked with investigating legal compliance at the Department of Labor, an agency mired in ethics scandals right now, it is that much more important that IG D'Esposito act within the law and respect the clear separation between politics and his duties as an executive branch official,” said Donald Sherman, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, in a statement to Government Executive. “This further undermines the public's trust in the Department of Labor and its watchdog, as America’s job growth numbers continue to lag."

D’Esposito was sworn in as IG on Jan. 5 after facing questions throughout the confirmation process about his ability to provide independent oversight of the Labor Department, considering he is a former GOP congressman.

On Wednesday, Newsday reported that an elections coalition of unions and left-leaning groups filed a Hatch Act complaint against D’Esposito over a Jan. 9 interview he gave with a New York radio host.

During the segment, the Labor IG said that “there’s no question that we’re exploring” a run for Congress and that “we’re doing the polling [and] we’re talking to people on the ground and we want to make sure that the resources are going to be there.”

He also called his successor, Rep. Laura Gillen, D-N.Y., a “disastrous member of Congress” and said that it’s important for GOP candidates to have funding to deliver effective campaign messaging.

Under the Hatch Act, there is a prohibition on federal employees from being candidates in partisan elections, which extends to preliminary activities such as conducting polls, having campaign strategy meetings or authorizing others to take such actions on their behalf. The law also bars government workers from engaging in political activity in their official capacity and from soliciting or receiving political contributions.

Republican leaders for the county that covers D’Esposito’s former district recently backed a former mayor, John A. DeGrace, as the party’s nominee for the seat.

Additionally, Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., ranking members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, respectively, on March 10 sent D’Esposito a letter asking if he has participated in any campaign activities since he was sworn in as IG.

“An inspector general is expected to maintain an even greater level of non-partisan independence than other federal employees,” they wrote. “You have a responsibility to be transparent with Congress and with the public regarding any political activity you have undertaken since taking office as inspector general.”

During his confirmation hearing before the panel in October 2025, Blumenthal asked D’Esposito why his campaign website was still up. In response, he said that it was not active and that no fundraising was being done.

In their letter, however, the two Democratic senators referenced Federal Election Commission data that shows the “D’Esposito for New York” campaign committee received contributions between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2025.

Likewise, during a March 5 hearing, Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., asked D’Esposito if he was planning on resigning based on a March 4 Newsday report that he would soon launch a political campaign.

D’Esposito didn’t directly answer the question, saying “I am here on this panel today answering your questions as the inspector general.” He also added that he is “well aware of the Hatch Act.”

Based on that article and Peters and Blumenthal’s letter, Stephanie Rapp-Tully, a federal employment attorney, told Government Executive by email that “it does appear that IG D'Esposito may have violated the Hatch Act.”

“His actions prior to and after he took office as IG, especially given his testimony during his confirmation hearing, are reason for concern,” she wrote.

The Labor Department’s IG office did not respond to a request for comment.

The Hatch Act is enforced by the Office of Special Counsel. After a legal battle, President Donald Trump in 2025 fired the agency’s head, who was appointed by Joe Biden, before the end of his five-year term.

Penalties for violating the Hatch Act can include a civil fine of up to $1,000, suspension or removal from federal service.

Rapp-Tully noted that D’Esposito probably wouldn’t be concerned about termination, as he would likely resign if he officially initiates a reelection campaign.

“However, a candidate’s veracity may make a difference in the outcome of an election,” she wrote.

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Trump’s anti-fraud task force poised to scrutinize benefits programs

Natalie Alms — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:52:26 -0400

The White House is kicking off President Donald Trump’s “war on fraud” with a focus on federally-funded benefits like housing, food and cash assistance programs.

Among the tactics that a new anti-fraud task force will be pursuing is withholding government funding to state and local jurisdictions whose anti-fraud controls for benefits are deemed inadequate and increasing data-sharing between states and the federal government, according to the Monday executive order establishing the task force.

Both moves, already deployed by the White House in the name of fighting fraud, have at times been blocked by courts.

Anti-fraud experts have long wanted the federal government to take a more coordinated approach against fraud in government programs. But some worry that the Trump administration is using fraud as a pretext for political goals, including immigration enforcement.

The new task force, which will be drafting an anti-fraud strategy, will be chaired by Vice President J.D. Vance and vice-chaired by the head of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller will also serve on the task force as a senior advisor.

It’s unclear why Ferguson is taking this position on the task force. The FTC doesn’t currently play a role in combating fraud in government benefit programs, although it does run a government portal for people to report identity theft.

The task force will also have an executive director, who has yet to be named, to direct the day-to-day operations of the task force, as well as representatives from various government agencies.

Those agencies will have to identify what parts of their benefit programs are most susceptible to fraud and adopt anti-fraud requirements like identity verification, increased documentation and better back-end data checks within 60 days.

Government agencies will also be maximizing enforcement of eligibility requirements for government benefits and looking across agencies and programs for fraud risk indicators.

“The ‘war on fraud’ is long overdue, but the real question is whether this is a true shift in strategy or, worse, another moment of over-politicization without changing the underlying system,” said Jordan Burris, the head of public sector at identity verification platform Socure. He previously worked on cybersecurity in the White House.

Pre-payment controls, stronger data sharing and centralized coordination are all “encouraging signals,” he said, although “this has to become more than a finger-pointing exercise between federal, state, and local actors.”

Since taking office, Trump has fired nearly 20 inspectors general, whose very jobs are to combat waste, fraud and abuse in the government. He and his top officials have also cited fraud for a variety of their most controversial actions, such as shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development last year. Many of those claims of fraud at USAID were false or misleading.

As many government benefit programs are delivered by states, the executive order notes that the task force may recommend “any ways that Federal funds may be withheld from jurisdictions that do not have adequate anti-fraud requirements.”

The text of the order name-checks four blue states, “reinforcing the suspicion that the war on fraud is effectively a war on blue state safety nets,” wrote Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, in a recent blog. “The Trump administration seems to think if it succeeds in pushing its fraud narrative, it can justify what are, in reality, just cuts to the existing program that individual beneficiaries rely on.”

Editor's note: This article has been updated to note that Stephen Miller is also serving on the anti-fraud task force.

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Watchdog warns of challenges as IRS handles first tax season after Trump staffing cuts

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:30:57 -0400

The IRS is facing its first tax season since the Trump administration implemented workforce reductions across the agency, and the Government Accountability Office warned in a report Monday that the instability could hamper service performance.

Based on a December 2025 internal IRS report, according to GAO, agency managers flagged that staffing gaps as well as challenges implementing changes to the tax code mandated by the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act posed the biggest risks to a successful filing season, which runs from Jan. 26 through April 15.

“IRS also found that the [43-day fall government] shutdown led to hiring delays and compressed timelines to onboard and train new staff,” investigators wrote. “As a result, IRS concluded return processing, customer service and other functions would enter filing season undertrained or understaffed, which could lead to processing errors and poor customer service and ultimately harm taxpayers.”

While voluntary separation incentives like the deferred resignation program and early retirement offers, which resulted in the majority of IRS’ roughly 26,100 separations, began during the 2025 tax season, many participating employees did not begin their paid leave until after April. As such, last year’s filing period was largely unaffected by the workforce changes.

Still, GAO found that these separations contributed to an increase in the average number of days (27 to 36) it took IRS to process paper returns after the end of 2025’s tax season compared with after 2024’s filing period.

“IRS officials said that staff separations in 2025, which included more tenured employees who had more experience processing paper returns, contributed to the much higher processing time post-filing season,” investigators wrote.

GAO also criticized IRS’ 2025 workforce cuts for being “not targeted or strategic.” The auditors noted, for example, that in July 2025 officials began allowing employees to rescind their participation in the deferred resignation program in order to “fill critical vacancies.” Additionally, investigators reported that the agency in fiscal 2026 has rehired some employees who had left the agency through deferred resignation or early retirement.

The report also flagged several consequences of the federal hiring freeze on IRS performance in 2025 including:

Officials said that the agency may have been able to meet its goal to process paper returns in an average of 13 days or less if not for the hiring pause. However, the IRS did perform better in this area than in 2024.
Use of overtime to process returns increased by 38% between 2024 and 2025, which officials said was primarily due to them being unable to meet hiring targets. (GAO has previously reported that the IRS relies too much on overtime.)
The agency was able to fully staff fewer taxpayer assistance centers that provide in-person service in 2025 compared with 2024, in part, due to the freeze.

GAO recommended that the IRS create an implementation team to oversee the agency’s workforce overhauls and that leaders address staffing losses as part of the IRS strategic workforce plan, which is under development. In response to a draft of the report, agency officials did not express agreement or disagreement with the recommendations but said they would share details after the report is finalized.

Frank Bisignano, the head of the Social Security Administration and de facto leader of the IRS, testified before Congress earlier this month that he “feels good” about the IRS' current staffing level, while acknowledging that there hasn’t been any assessment of the workforce’s effectiveness post-reductions.

The inspector general for the IRS and National Taxpayer Advocate have also raised concerns with the agency’s preparedness for the 2026 tax season, citing reduced staffing.

Government Executive reported in February that the IRS has transferred human resources and IT staffers to handle tax returns and customer service.

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Many federal programs are missing from an OMB inventory, watchdog reports

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:40:00 -0400

While President Donald Trump has sought to shrink the size of federal agencies since the start of his second term, the Office of Management and Budget for years has struggled to quantify exactly how many government programs there are.

Since 2011, OMB has been required to create and annually update a publicly available inventory of federal programs. The agency in 2024 launched an expanded inventory pursuant to additional congressional directives and updated it in January 2025.

The Government Accountability Office in a March 5 report, however, found that OMB is not meeting all requirements with respect to the inventory.

The website has spending information for more than 2,600 federal programs, but many programs are not included, such as those dealing with acquisition, regulations and defense. Defense programs are typically the top recipient of congressionally appropriated funding; they represented nearly half of discretionary outlays in 2025.

GAO also reported that OMB is not archiving past inventories, contravening statutory requirements and preventing users from comparing past and current spending on specific programs.

Investigators also found that the data in the inventory was not always accurate. For example, 157 federal financial assistance programs did not have any reported spending. And the website says that it has information on more than $7 trillion in fiscal 2024 expenditures. But GAO noted that the number is incorrect because OMB combined different types of spending data: obligations (planned spending), outlays (actual spending) and revenue losses.

As of February, OMB has not publicized any plans to finish the inventory.

“Without implementation plans that cover all required programs and information, OMB has not positioned itself to develop a comprehensive inventory,” investigators wrote. “An incomplete inventory is limited in its effectiveness as a tool for Congress and the public to oversee and understand what the federal government does, spends and achieves through its programs.”

GAO made 17 recommendations, including that OMB incorporate all federal programs in the inventory, archive past spending data and ensure information on the website is transparent and accessible.

For almost all reports, GAO provides officials from the agency that is the subject of the report with the opportunity to comment on the watchdog’s findings. Officials typically respond, but OMB did not provide any comments on this report.

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Whistleblower report about waste leads to downsizing at one agency, OSC reports

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:45:00 -0500

The Office of Special Counsel said Thursday that a whistleblower complaint within the Health and Human Services Department has led one agency to slash staffing due to findings of government waste.

An individual alleged to OSC, which can receive whistleblower complaints, that the Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals was overstaffed following an increase in headcount at that agency in recent years to help process a backlog of appeals.

In 2014, the American Hospital Association sued HHS because officials were missing statutory deadlines for reviewing denials of claims for Medicare reimbursement. A federal court in 2018 ordered HHS to adhere to such required timelines, after which the department increased staffing at OMHA. By 2022, the appeals backlog was mostly resolved.

While case levels decreased, according to an OSC press release, the agency’s expanded workforce remained the same size. Workloads went from around 1,000 cases per agency legal team to roughly 50.

HHS investigators found that this led to approximately $30 million in wasteful personnel spending between 2023 and 2024. In response, OMHA, as of August 2025, cut its staff by 185 employees, or about 23%, “through retirements, resignations, reassignments, separations and other attrition.”

“This disclosure brought needed attention to OMHA's serious overstaffing challenges,” said OSC senior counsel Charles Baldis in a statement. “OSC also appreciates HHS's decisive and substantive actions to prevent the waste of taxpayer dollars."

Baldis is the designated leader of the agency by Acting Special Counsel Jamieson Greer, who is also U.S. trade representative. President Donald Trump fired the previous special counsel — Hampton Dellinger, who was appointed by Joe Biden — before the end of his term.

The Trump administration has prioritized downsizing the federal workforce, arguing that doing so will improve agency efficiency.

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Homeland Security Department is stonewalling watchdog investigations, GOP senator alleges

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:33:00 -0500

During a Tuesday hearing with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a GOP senator accused department officials of obstructing watchdog investigations.

Specifically, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., cited a letter from the DHS Office of Inspector General, which he said alleged that department leadership in 10 instances either misled investigators or prohibited certain inquiries.

“Does anybody have any idea how bad it has to be for the OIG in this agency to come out and do this publicly?” Tillis said. “That is stonewalling. That’s a failure of leadership. And that is why I’ve called for your resignation.”

The lawmaker’s office did not immediately respond to a request to provide a copy of the letter.

Tillis said that he would put procedural hurdles on several legislative activities until DHS responds to his questions with respect to the OIG’s letter and other matters.

The senator, who is not running for reelection, also criticized Noem’s policy of reviewing any Federal Emergency Management Agency expenditure that is $100,000 or more, which he said has caused delays to hurricane recovery efforts, and the department’s handling of the killings of two immigration protestors in Minneapolis by federal agents. Those shootings have led to the ongoing funding lapse for DHS.

“We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership,” he said. “And you’ve demonstrated anything but that in the time that I’ve seen you responding to the emergency in North Carolina and across the southeast and acknowledging when mistakes are made and speaking too soon for the expediency of social media or whatever it is.”

Likewise, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., in February accused DHS of threatening to halt OIG investigations into immigration-related operations. Specifically, she said the department’s general counsel repeatedly informed watchdog officials about a provision of law that authorizes the secretary to halt an audit or investigation for certain reasons, including to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information or protect national security.

The DHS OIG has recently launched inquiries into:

Whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement appropriately investigates allegations of excessive use of force and holds agents accountable.
DHS’ processes for determining U.S. citizenship for individuals it detains or arrests during immigration operations.
Whether Customs and Border Protection conducts immigration enforcement in the country’s interior in accordance with federal rules.

The watchdog office is led by Joseph Cuffari, who was confirmed during Trump’s first term and who was spared from the January 2025 mass firings of inspectors general.

In 2024, a committee of agency IGs and other federal investigative officials substantiated allegations that Cuffari abused his authority and engaged in substantial misconduct, which mostly dealt with an outside investigation into former employees who questioned his qualifications.

The panel recommended that the president take “appropriate action, up to and including removal” against him, but Joe Biden did not discipline him.

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Memo to JD Vance: Fighting the War on waste

Donald F. Kettl — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:51:00 -0500

During President Trump’s State of the Union address, the president said, “I am officially announcing the war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance.” And, he boldly added, “we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight. It’ll go very quickly.”

The pledge to balance the budget by eliminating fraud is an old one. Clinton, Reagan, Obama and Biden all said they would wring out fraud and they never got close to the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Moreover, the idea that we could remotely come close to balancing the budget by eliminating fraud is ludicrous. The deficit at the end of fiscal 2025 was $1.8 trillion. The Government Accountability Office estimates that the amount of fraud in the federal government stands between $233 billion and $521 billion.

There are two things we can conclude. Even at the best, eliminating every possible dollar of fraud would only cut the deficit by a little more than 25%. But $521 billion ain’t chump change. We need to wish Vice President Vance godspeed in what’s surely an important mission.

So: here’s a memo to the vice president about how to start.

Dear Vice President Vance,

You stand in the shoes of many previous generals in the war on waste. The launch of their campaigns has always created great headlines, but their results have usually been disappointing.

Let’s start with two boring but important facts. One is that no one really knows how much fraud there is. Money can leak like water from an old water main—you know how much you’re putting in, you have a fair idea about what’s coming out and you can’t always tell where the leaks are along the way.

The second is that “fraud” is a deceptive label. It’s clearly wrong to create a bogus identity to milk cash from the federal government, but it’s often very hard to separate a good program poorly managed from a bad program criminally draining cash.

In the tales of rampant fraud among Minnesota day care centers, which prompted the latest headlines, some of what is presented as fraud actually is sloppy overbilling. Many of the day care centers had state licensing violations, including keeping the facilities clean and keeping records of vaccinations, but state investigators found very few instances of outright fraud. A 2025 federal report found that there were errors in 11% of the payments made to Minnesota day care centers, so there clearly are big problems. Figuring out what’s causing them is much tougher than appears on the surface.

These twin facts often sent the generals of previous wars on fraud to give up the battle and look for other wars to fight, but you can make big progress. Here’s how:

Know the enemy. Announcing an attack on “fraud” is tempting. Delivering is a lot harder, because fraud is like fat marbled through a terrific steak. A clumsy job of trying to cut it out can miss the fat and turn the steak into expensive hamburger.

Identify the target. The place to start is with “improper payments,” which GAO defines as “payments that should not have been made or that were made in an improper amount.” It’s a clumsy term. Not all improper payments are fraud—some are legitimate but trapped in sloppy bookkeeping. Not all fraud comes from improper payments—some people commit non-financial fraud, like illegally obtaining a passport. But improper payments are the place to start.

Go where the money is. The bank robber Willie Sutton was right—the highest potential for recovering money must start by attacking the biggest targets. More than half of all improper payments—53%—come from just Medicare and Medicaid. Another 7% in SNAP. There are tax-related improper payments, especially in the earned income tax credit. But in general, the rest of the government accounts for $41 billion in improper payments. This suggests where to aim the war on fraud.

Invest in the front-line troops. This means shoring up the inspectors general, who are the government’s fraud-fighting cops. It means investing in the key federal employees, since one person’s salary can leverage enormous amounts of money. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for example, spends $252 million for every one of its employees.

Strengthen risk management and financial control activities. Sounds boring, I know. In fact, the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld spent a whole episode getting laughs from just how boring risk management seemed, and the episode won an award from the Writers Guild of America. But the key to separating fraud from other federal activities requires knowing where to look and having the tools to poke under the blankets. Most important, it’s essential to build roadblocks to fraud before it occurs. That’s a whole lot cheaper and more effective.

Develop new tools. Artificial intelligence seems invented to fight the way on waste. In the Medicaid program, for example, the biggest sources of fraud are billing for unnecessary services or services no one actually provides, upcoding (bumping up the level of complexity of a service to make more money), card sharing and obtaining drugs for sale on the side, among others. In a program with millions of transactions, this is a true needle-in-a-haystack problem. AI can help identify the right haystacks and find the most promising needles.

Understand that some problems that look like fraud are actually the result of poor management capacity, that others actually are fraud and that it’s often hard to tell the difference. Billions of dollars of federal money go to small nonprofits without much experience in managing programs or keeping track of the money. On the other hand, bad actors are always working hard to bilk the federal government out of taxpayers’ dollars. An effective war on fraud requires devising separate strategies for each of these problems—and figuring out when to use which one. It’s a problem that’s been around as long as there have been wars on waste.

Finally, a word of warning. It can be tremendously tempting to use the war on fraud to target political opponents. That’s easy because, unfortunately, there’s fraud everywhere. The rate of improper payments isn’t a measure of fraud, but it does give us clues about where to go looking.

Minnesota, for example, has an improper payment rate of 2.2%, but that’s less than half of the national average of 5.9%. The blue-state average is 6.3 percent. In blue Delaware, it’s 19.6%. Connecticut’s rate is 19.8%. But it’s not a partisan problem. The red-state average is 5.7%. In red Wyoming, it’s 20.7%; it’s 20.5% in South Carolina; and it’s 18.7% in Idaho.

There’s big money to recapture from controlling fraud and improving management. Any serious campaign to rake the money back, however, will fail if it’s a partisan war on waste. Nobody has a monopoly the problem—or the solutions.

So, Mr. Vice President, you are heading down a road that many have traveled before. Many travelers in the past have gotten stuck in ruts and potholes. But if you want to make real progress in saving taxpayer dollars, this is the road forward.

Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

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Bipartisan lawmakers worried about shaky progress on modernized government worker background check system

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:22:00 -0500

Members of both parties in a Tuesday hearing expressed concerns about continued progress on implementation of an over budget and much delayed IT system that will support an updated background check program for federal employees.

Officials testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations that work on the National Background Investigation Services system will be finished in fiscal 2028, despite an initial estimated completion date in fiscal 2019.

The nearly decade-long setback has come at a cost. Witnesses also reported that the government has spent at least $2.4 billion on NBIS development as well as maintaining legacy systems and is expected to need $2.2 billion more to finish the project.

In addition to criticizing the costs, lawmakers warned about delays to government personnel vetting reforms under Trusted Workforce 2.0.

“Without these vetting reforms in place, or the promised information technology like NBIS that serve as their backbone, security clearance providers and recipients lack advanced tools and the assurance that their personal information is guarded and safe,” said subcommittee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas. “This is not a partisan issue. This is a national security issue.”

Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., the panel’s ranking member, emphasized that this issue impacts government contractors, as well.

“This has left contractors in my district, and districts all across the country, stuck with unclear instructions and increased costs as they juggle various systems,” he said. “In a region where roughly 9% of jobs require a security clearance, this really is not a small problem.”

Witnesses and lawmakers, however, noted that the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which is responsible for NBIS, has made some headway.

Alissa Czyz, the director of Defense Capabilities and Management at the Government Accountability Office, stressed that DCSA now has a reliable cost estimate for NBIS and that the agency implemented all 13 cybersecurity recommendations the watchdog made in 2024 with respect to the system.

But both she and members of Congress expressed reservations that the DCSA does not have permanent leadership. The previous director, David Cattler, retired in September 2025. And the acting director, Justin Overbaugh, concurrently serves as the deputy undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.

Overbaugh told the subcommittee that selecting a new DCSA director with government and private sector experience is a priority of the department. He also blamed past NBIS delays on the culture at the agency and said that the Trump administration has removed officials who were “stymieing progress.”

“I have found what I expected: a dedicated, talented and innovative workforce unfortunately shackled by burdensome processes designed not to empower them, but to maintain the status quo and sustain layers of management,” he said. “Our focus now is on unleashing their potential. To that end, we are designing the agency for purpose, moving it from a cumbersome bureaucracy to an agile organization that can serve as a model for the rest of government.”

Czyz also said that GAO found shortcomings with DCSA’s new schedule for NBIS development. Specifically, she said the agency did not perform a risk analysis that could show where slip-ups are most likely to occur.

Overbaugh said that a schedule addressing those concerns would be complete in March or April.

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GAO report offers new details on the workers agencies lost last year

Erich Wagner — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:53:00 -0500

Newly released data from the Government Accountability Office offers some of the most granular glimpses yet of how the Trump administration’s sprint to remake the federal workforce in the president’s image impacted agency headcounts.

The report, published Tuesday, responds to a request by congressional Democrats to catalog data related to a variety of workforce changes undertaken shortly after President Trump returned to office last January, including reductions in force, the purge of recently hired or promoted employees with fewer civil service protections and the deferred resignation program.

GAO said it relied upon data from the Office of Personnel Management and individual agencies in compiling its report. OPM has previously said that around 317,000 federal workers left government in 2025. The watchdog agency’s report captures the first six months of Trump’s second term, capturing a fraction of that throughput.

“Of the 134,122 employees who separated from the 23 CFO Act agencies during the period from January to June 2025, a substantial majority (around 77%) retired or resigned,” GAO found. “Another roughly 19% were terminated or removed from their positions. Of these, agencies reported that nearly 4,500 employees (or about 3%) were terminated during a probationary or trial period.”

The Veterans Affairs and Defense departments saw the largest downward swing in headcount of any agency in terms of sheer number of workers during that time span, losing a net of 19,103 and 15,029 employees, respectively. But relative to an agency’s total workforce, the embattled Education Department, which the administration aims to abolish, saw the most job losses, with its workforce cratering by more than 20%.

Other notable trends during the first half of 2025 include the Social Security Administration, which saw its workforce fall by more than 5,500 employees, well over half of the 7,000 in headcount reductions its new leadership aspired to last spring and ultimately eclipsed by more than 400 workers. The agency has since reassigned hundreds of staffers to handle customer service duties on its 1-800 number as it struggles to keep up with taxpayer demand.

GAO’s data also reveals a better sense of the scope of the controversial deferred resignation program, an offer devised by Elon Musk to pay federal workers to sit on extended administrative leave until the end of fiscal 2025, at which point they would retire or resign. In the first half of 2025, nearly 144,000 employees were accepted into the program, the vast majority of whom stayed on the federal payroll until last fall or winter.

Among the top agencies in terms of deployment of deferred resignations were the Defense Department with 48,002 employees, Treasury with 17,640 and the Agriculture Department, where 16,414 applied for and received deferred resignation. The U.S. Agency for International Development saw relatively few DRP participants at just 251, though more than 2,000—nearly half—were already on extended administrative leave as the Trump administration pushed to shutter the agency.

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Amid immigration agent hiring surge, watchdog flags shortages on the U.S.-Canada border

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:10:00 -0500

While the Trump administration has launched a campaign to recruit immigration enforcement officers, the Government Accountability Office reported on Feb. 12 that officials do not have a plan to address a shortage of employees in a non-uniformed position that is key to securing the northern border.

Law enforcement information systems specialists monitor surveillance cameras along the 4,000-mile border between the U.S. and Canada, where apprehensions have more than tripled between fiscal 2019 and 2024. During that same period, however, the number of agents assigned to the northern border has decreased by about 6%.

Given that reduction, investigators wrote that surveillance employees are even more important. But only 77% of specialist positions were filled at the end of fiscal 2024, compared with an 84% staffing rate at the end of fiscal 2018.

“Without a plan identifying strategies to address the gap in Law Enforcement Information Systems Specialists in sectors along the northern border, Border Patrol is not well-positioned to fill vacancies and reduce attrition,” the report authors wrote. “In turn, Border Patrol does not have the resources needed to fully monitor land-based surveillance technology along the border, particularly in light of the expanded deployment of surveillance technology since fiscal year 2019.”

Border Patrol officials told investigators that hurdles to hiring these specialists include a long background check, the high cost of living in areas where they’d work and few career advancement opportunities.

GAO recommended that Customs and Border Protection create a strategy to address workforce gaps for the position, which the Homeland Security Department concurred with and said would be addressed by April 30.

DHS officials wrote in response to the report that employees who process detained migrants are being trained to cover the specialist positions and that 18 vacancies have been filled this way. Officials also said that they would consider providing a retention bonus to minimize attrition.

The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act provided CBP with more than $2 billion to recruit and retain agents.

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Indian Affairs regional employees have more work and fewer people to do it, watchdog reports

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:44:00 -0500

Regional employees for the Interior Department’s Indian Affairs component have been forced to contend with workforce cuts and increased workloads under the administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, according to a Government Accountability Office report published on Tuesday.

Agency officials told investigators that they expected 580 separations at the regional level by the end of calendar year 2025. In contrast, there were 280 regional separations in fiscal 2024.

As a result, three regional offices reported that they were set to shed more than 20% of their staff due to separation incentives that the Trump administration offered. And officials in one region said that, due to a shortage of wildland fire staffers, they needed to rely on volunteers and local firefighters to respond to a recent wildfire.

Indian Affairs has 12 regional offices, providing support to about 2.5 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

Even before Trump’s federal workforce cuts, however, Indian Affairs regional offices were dealing with staff shortages. Regional workers decreased from 2,675 to 2,540 between fiscal 2022 and 2024.

As such, Indian Affairs officials told GAO that an infusion of funding that the component received in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act presented problems for the workforce.

Congress appropriated $385 million to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is under Indian Affairs, through the IRA for use through the end of fiscal 2031. Investigators reported that, as of December 2025, roughly $186.1 million of that funding had not yet been expended.

Regional officials shared that IRA implementation impacted workloads, including through reassignments of employees outside of their areas of expertise.

“Officials we interviewed from one region stated that federal funds like the IRA are similar to an ‘unfunded mandate’ because regional offices need to implement the funding without an increase in staff,” investigators wrote.

Additionally, GAO reported that the disbursements of more than 65% of Indian Affairs IRA funds were paused due to Trump executive orders that mandated reviews of federal spending, which created confusion for tribes.

“Officials from six regions and a tribal organization representative told us that some tribes had to push out project timelines from a few weeks to a year or more because of contractor availability and local weather restrictions,” according to the report. “Officials from three of these regions also said that these delays likely would increase project costs for materials and labor.”

Due to these various pressures, GAO found that regional Indian Affairs employees worked more than 1 million overtime hours between fiscal 2023 and August 2025, which equals more than 480 full-time equivalent employees.

Instead of focusing on increasing staffing, GAO recommended that Indian Affairs systematically identify opportunities to streamline agency policies and expand the use of self-determination contracts and self-governance compacts. Under such agreements, tribes assume greater responsibility for administering federal programs.

An Interior Department spokesperson said that Indian Affairs agrees with the recommendations.

“We continue to modernize internal policies, improve regional operations and expand staff training to increase efficiency, accountability and support for tribal self-determination,” the spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive. “Following the final report, Indian Affairs will outline specific actions, timelines and responsible parties to implement these improvements.”

Earlier this month, GAO reported that staff cuts at Indian Affairs under the Trump administration have exacerbated longstanding workforce challenges.

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‘My dream job has turned into a nightmare’: Ex-feds and public service experts testify to Congress on how to rebuild government post-Trump

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:37:17 -0500

Updated at 11:55 a.m. ET Feb. 17

House Democrats examined the fallout from the Trump administration’s agency workforce cuts and potential congressional measures to rebuild the civil service and strengthen executive branch oversight during a Thursday roundtable with good government experts and former employees.

“If you just put it in place like before or leave it like it is, it's clear that someone like Donald Trump — who doesn't care about the law, doesn't care about ethics, doesn't care about norms or traditions — will just run roughshod over it,” said Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md.

Several speakers condemned the recent finalization of Schedule Policy/Career (formerly Schedule F), which would remove civil service job protections for tens of thousands of federal employees in “policy-related” positions.

Rob Shriver, former acting director of the Office of Personnel Management under President Joe Biden, argued that subjecting the federal workforce to increased political influence would deter people from wanting to work for agencies.

“Federal workers come to the job because they want to make a difference, and they want to be judged based on their merit and not based on their politics. That's been ingrained in our system since the 1880s, and this administration is now taking this back,” said Shriver, who is now a senior official at the Democracy Forward nonprofit. “We need to rebuild that trust, rebuild these guardrails and make sure that the American people understand that the people who work in the federal government are working for them.”

Trump officials have contended that Schedule P/C will not lead to federal employees being fired on the basis of their personal politics.

At the roundtable, former Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., a Trump critic, suggested establishing bipartisan groups organized by issue area to advise Congress on oversight of agencies.

“You could gather people together and brainstorm with them to use their expertise,” she said. “Certainly we have a large pool of retired [feds] who have watched all of this and who want to help in a lot of ways. Some are already engaged.”

Krista Boyd, who was inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management before Trump fired her and is now a senior official at the nonprofit American Oversight, urged Congress to conduct more roundtables and investigations into the executive branch and strengthen the Freedom of Information Act.

She also argued that there should be consequences for any actions committed by the Trump administration that may be illegal. Specifically, she pointed to reports that officials improperly shared agency data.

“If that kind of behavior is allowed to stand without accountability, it will belittle additional reforms that are put in place,” she said.

Lawmakers and advocates also brought up familiar proposals, including halting reductions in force, restoring union representation in response to the president revoking collective bargaining rights for two-thirds of federal employees and increasing government pay so that it’s more comparable with the private sector.

Thursday’s roundtable took place in Fairfax County, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., where unemployment spiked following federal job cuts. Former civil servants also testified about how losing their careers has impacted them.

Kelly Jabar, who handled offboarding at the Food and Drug Administration before she was laid off, flagged several operational issues with how the Trump administration let her team go. She said that the termination notice did not state where to send government equipment and that colleagues received documents from the agency with the personal information of other people.

Jabar said that she struggled to get answers to any of her questions, including how long her health insurance would last, which was important to her as she was battling breast cancer.

“My dream job has turned into a nightmare,” she said. “I just wanted to heal, and this just keeps giving me more and more stress.”

Kenneth Bledsoe described his family’s chaotic evacuation from the Democratic Republic of the Congo after the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“There were explosions and gunfire, leaving under cover of night, going days without sleep, only a carry-on bag for each of us, crowded onto tiny boats with our fellow diplomats, their babies and their pets,” he said.

Jacob Cross discussed losing his job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as part of the February 2025 mass firings of employees in their probationary periods, generally those who have been hired or promoted within the past year.

Cross said that he spent nearly a decade in the private sector specializing in tech, but it was his goal to work for the federal government. In recent months, the Trump administration has launched Tech Force to recruit tech employees.

Around the time of his firing, his wife found out she was pregnant. While Cross has since gotten a new job, he had to take a pay cut. The former fed compared his family’s situation to that of the government.

“While something may seem OK on the surface, the reality can be much different. My family navigated our hardships, and we are so lucky to have our daughter with us now. But because of the indiscriminate and cruel treatment we received as part of the DOGE firings, we took on debt, and my wife was forced to go back to work sooner,” he said. “My former program office is the same way. The dedicated civil servants that are still working there are ensuring the mission stays on track, but the innovations and growth that are necessary to make sure we stay on track for the future have been put on hold.”

Clarification: An earlier version of this story referred to the event as a hearing, as some Democratic members did. Under House rules, however, only the majority party can formally convene a hearing, so this event was not an official committee hearing.

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