Patrick G. Eddington
The Government Accountability Office (GAO)—Congress’s investigative watchdog—usually gets at least grudging cooperation from executive branch departments and agencies when conducting its audits. Yesterday, GAO released a terse two-page “review” of the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) proposed reductions in force (RIF) and reorganization plans and activities that revealed how OPM reacted to GAO’s inquiries:
To supplement GAO’s analysis of publicly available data, GAO requested documentation from OPM regarding changes made to offices or programs since 2025, the rationale behind the closure or consolidation of offices, and processes for strategic workforce planning, among other information. Other than comments on a preliminary draft of this report, OPM did not provide any requested documents or information, nor did it agree to meet with GAO or respond to written questions. As a result, in this report, GAO is unable to provide complete information on what changes OPM made, its rationale, the expected costs and benefits, and any effect on OPM’s ability to fulfil its mission.
I bolded that sentence because OPM’s actions arguably violated federal law, and because I believe OPM’s actions here may be a harbinger of more such executive branch refusals to provide oversight.
OPM is not a discretionary creation of the current administration; it is a creature of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which abolished the old Civil Service Commission and split its functions among OPM, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority. The CSRA charged OPM with administering a merit-based civil service and gave it ongoing duties to evaluate personnel management practices across government. Documentation of why it closed ten offices and shed a third of its staff is exactly the material Congress needs to judge whether OPM is meeting its statutory mission—and GAO’s access to it rests on 31 U.S.C. § 716, which authorizes the Comptroller General to obtain the agency records GAO requires and prescribes a specific escalation procedure when an agency balks: a written demand to the agency head, who then has 20 days to justify withholding, followed, if necessary, by a report to the President, OMB, and Congress, and ultimately a civil suit to compel production.
An agency created by statute to safeguard the merit system and funded by annual appropriations to do so does not hold its records as private property—or at least that’s been the understanding of presidents of both parties and Congress for nearly 50 years.
On April 1, 2026, the Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional, on the theory that where the Constitution vests power directly in the president, a congressional statute purporting to regulate its exercise is not merely outweighed but void—something the executive need not obey.
To be clear, thus far no document has surfaced showing OPM invoking the Gaiser opinion as the basis for its refusal to submit to GAO’s audit, and the connection I am drawing is structural, not a proven chain of authority—at this point. But the posture is the same.
The Gaiser opinion’s operational move is to act first and decline to submit the action to external review—treating a statutory constraint as a nullity rather than litigating it. OPM’s refusal to open its reorganization plans and actions to GAO for review is the same posture, translated from records into workforce management: proceed unilaterally and treat the oversight mechanism and the laws authorizing it as optional. One is the declaratory version of the claim that the executive core lies beyond congressional reach; the other is the administrative version.
The machinery Congress built to see inside the executive branch—GAO audits, IG reviews, the § 716 access process—assumes good-faith participation. When an agency declines to participate, and a parallel legal theory supplies a principled-sounding rationale for treating oversight statutes as non-binding, the ordinary tools degrade into requests that can be ignored. The next confrontations will not always announce themselves as constitutional showdowns. Some will look exactly like this one: a quiet refusal to meet with investigators, much less supply requested documents. The result: a lawfully exercised oversight power thwarted by executive fiat that leaves Congress and the public in the dark about what a federal agency or department is actually doing—or not doing—with taxpayer dollars.
Congress’s remedies remain—subpoenas, appropriations riders, the § 716 escalation, and, ultimately, the courts. Whether it uses them is the open question, given the current House majority’s largely lockstep support for President Trump.
The OPM report is worth reading not for its numbers but for its final admission: the audit arm of Congress asked a cabinet-level agency to explain itself, and was met with outright refusal. Whether OPM would refuse a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the same information GAO sought is something I intend to test.
