The impending retirement that could rock Capitol Hill

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Politico

09/17/2025 07:00 PM EDT


More than three dozen lawmakers are already planning to leave Congress next year. But there’s another impending legislative branch retirement that could have major implications in Washington. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who heads the Government Accountability Office, hits the end of his 15-year term Dec. 22 and will be forced to vacate the post that occupies an increasingly crucial — and politically charged — oversight role.

The comptroller general is uniquely empowered to call out the president for breaking the law by withholding federal cash, and Dodaro has done so repeatedly over the past eight months — putting himself at the center of a largely partisan fight over President Donald Trump’s funding moves that has exacerbated tensions between the White House and Capitol Hill. Now Trump gets to nominate Dodaro’s replacement, and key lawmakers are only just starting to take stock of a paradox: A president who continually tests the bounds of Congress’ spending powers gets to pick the legislative branch’s chief watchdog.

“It sets up a very bad situation,” Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the next Senate Democratic whip and a senior appropriator, said in an interview. “Among the things to be alarmed about, this is a new one.” The stakes are high: Whoever ends up running GAO once Dodaro’s term ends will be able to bolster, or undermine, Congress’ defenses against Trump in the separation-of-powers battle the president is stoking by terminating, freezing and reallocating hundreds of billions of dollars Congress previously approved.

“When one party controls the Senate, the House and the White House, there’s a tendency to rally around the president and to do what the president wants,” said David Walker, Dodaro’s predecessor and the only living former GAO director. “But somebody’s got to be able to be the independent referee, and to try to do what they think is in the interest of the institution, the Congress and the country. And that’s what the comptroller general is.”

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/17/gao-trump-impoundment-spending-00569967