The White House says DOGE employees were trained on ethics and how to manage government records, but won’t give Congress’ watchdog the receipts to back that up.
The Government Accountability Office released a report Wednesday claiming that the White House, Elon Musk and government agencies did not fully cooperate with its oversight investigation, leaving basic questions about how DOGE operated unanswered over a year after the government-slashing group began its work.
DOGE’s work pushing government employees out of their jobs, cutting government spending and pressing for high-level access to government data and systems repeatedly sparked ethics, privacy and records concerns.
The GAO asked the White House and 25 federal agencies for information on DOGE personnel who were employed by the Executive Office of the President through the end of this January. That’s already a subset of the total number of associates who worked for DOGE, as some were employed by other agencies.
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In response, nine agencies sent back detailed information on about 60 DOGE employees. The watchdog group, using public information and court filings, identified nearly 150 other DOGE personnel in total.
Ten agencies — including ones that were early focuses for DOGE, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Musk’s team dismantled — didn’t provide the GAO with any information. Others said they didn’t have DOGE employees. The White House provided responses to some questions from the GAO, but didn’t hand over any documentation or respond to requests for interviews.
The GAO mailed Musk a letter at Tesla headquarters asking for information about his position in the White House and with DOGE. He didn’t respond. Last year, the administration initially said Musk was in charge of the cost-cutting effort only to later pivot and say that a previously low-profile government bureaucrat, Amy Gleason, was the acting DOGE administrator.
The GAO also sent a letter to a senior policy advisor at Tesla’s Washington, D.C., office.
“Both letters were signed for upon delivery,” a footnote in the watchdog’s report reads. “We did not receive responses to either letter.”
The GAO did find that among the agencies that did respond, “completion statuses” for required training and financial disclosures “varied by agency,” the report says.
Those agencies told the GAO that 49 of the approximately 60 reported DOGE employees had completed ethics training, something that an employee’s “home agency” is responsible for. DOGE regularly detailed employees from one agency to another.
The White House — the home agency for most of the DOGE employees the GAO was investigating as part of this report — said that “DOGE personnel who held positions within EOP receive the same ethics training as all other EOP personnel.”
But it “did not respond to our requests for documentation showing whether individual DOGE personnel completed ethics training,” the GAO wrote.
Agencies told the watchdog that 18 of the roughly 60 DOGE staffers had done records-management training. At the General Services Administration, a DOGE stronghold, only three of the 21 DOGE employees were marked as having completed records-management training in government documentation.
The GAO also reviewed financial disclosure reports — which are required for federal employees whose roles involve the potential for conflicts of interest — for 38 of the approximately 60 DOGE-ers it received information on from agencies. The White House wouldn’t provide copies of these reports, the watchdog said.
At least a few DOGE associates appear not to have filed reports at all. The GSA told the GAO that two of its DOGE associates left before the disclosures were due at the 30-day mark of their work.
“The Administration continues to keep the American people in the dark, refusing to answer basic questions,” Rep. Richard Neal (D-Massachusetts), one of the lawmakers who asked the GAO to conduct this oversight report, told NOTUS in a statement.
The Trump administration has a history of stonewalling Congress’ watchdog agency, as NOTUS has previously reported. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has long sparred with the GAO and even said he doesn’t think the congressional oversight office should exist at all.
“The vast majority of agencies continue to cooperate with GAO,” Sarah Kaczmarek, the watchdog group’s managing director of public affairs, told NOTUS in a statement. “But timely cooperation from federal agencies is essential to ensuring Congress has the information it needs to conduct effective oversight.”
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