GAO Sets AI and Fiscal Oversight Priorities Through 2032 With No Confirmed Comptroller General and a House Bill Cutting Its Budget 25%

The Government Accountability Office released its strategic plan for 2027 to 2032 last week, setting out how Congress’s main watchdog means to spend the next six years. It puts artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and the federal fiscal outlook near the top. It was signed by an acting head, at an agency the House wants to cut by a quarter.

GAO writes a new plan every few years. It’s the document that tells committees what kind of work to expect and tells GAO’s own staff where hiring and training will go. This one comes at an awkward moment for the agency.

Three goals instead of four

The plan cuts GAO’s strategic goals from four to three. The first is independent analysis of federal programmes and spending for Congress. The second is improving federal performance and accountability. The third is GAO’s own capacity, meaning its staff and its technology.

Inside the first goal, the plan groups the work into well-being and economic security (health care, education, retirement income, housing, transport and energy), national security and emergency response, and science and technology policy. The second goal covers fraud, waste and abuse, government-wide management and acquisition, tax administration and the federal fiscal outlook. It also keeps GAO’s legal work, from bid protest decisions to appropriations law, which is where its impoundment rulings come from.

AI turns up in all three goals. GAO says it will assess how agencies use AI and whether their oversight frameworks work, including risks and international competitiveness. Under national security it will look at adversaries’ use of AI, autonomous systems and AI-assisted decision-making. For itself, it plans faster hiring in data science, AI and cybersecurity, AI training for staff, and wider use of AI and analytics in its audits through its Innovation Lab.

Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown wrote in the introduction that the plan starts during rapid change in government and society, and that GAO must adapt as congressional priorities shift.

The agency writing the plan is shrinking

The plan sets ambitions. The budget sets the size.

GAO asked for $860 million in appropriations for fiscal 2027, 5.9% more than the $811.9 million it got for fiscal 2026. Even that request supports 3,210 full-time equivalent staff, 10.2% fewer than at the end of fiscal 2024. Williams Brown told Senate appropriators in April that the workforce would fall to about 3,100 under the request.

The House Appropriations Committee went the other way. Its legislative branch bill, approved 34 to 28 on 20 May, gives GAO $611.9 million, a cut of 24.6% from this year. It also bars GAO from suing the executive branch under the Impoundment Control Act unless Congress passes a concurrent resolution allowing it. An amendment to strike that provision failed 28 to 34. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the committee’s top Democrat, put the likely job losses at about 1,000.

The House hasn’t passed the bill on the floor, and the Senate hasn’t marked up its version. GAO is running on the stopgap signed on 2 September, which holds it at fiscal 2026 levels until 11 December. The same fight happened a year ago: the House proposed cutting GAO almost in half for fiscal 2026, and the final law kept it flat.

So the plan’s hiring targets in AI and cybersecurity depend on a number the lame-duck Congress hasn’t picked yet. GAO’s IT staff have already been thinned by departures, FedScoop reported.

Nobody confirmed at the top

GAO has had no confirmed Comptroller General since Gene Dodaro’s 15-year term ended in December 2025. Williams Brown, previously the chief operating officer, has led the agency since.

The law gives Congress the first move. A commission of ten senior lawmakers from both parties and both chambers recommends at least three candidates; the President nominates; the Senate confirms. As of late September, Roll Call reported that the commission hadn’t been formed.

On 21 September more than a dozen groups, from Americans for Prosperity to Public Citizen, wrote to Congress asking it to take the President out of the process altogether. OMB Director Russell Vought said last year that GAO shouldn’t exist.

The acting head still exercises the job’s powers. On 16 October Williams Brown announced six appointments to the Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee, the 11-member panel that advises HHS on Medicare payment models and whose members the Comptroller General picks under the 2015 MACRA law.

GAO says its work produced $62.7 billion in financial benefits in fiscal 2025. Its record on DOGE’s savings claims and its high-risk list is the kind of work the new plan promises more of.

A six-year plan assumes the agency that wrote it will look much the same in six years. Congress decides that in December.