White House budget office 'has not been responsive' to probes into frozen funds, GAO says

Gene Dodaro, head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), testified on Tuesday that the White House’s chief budget office has “not been responsive” amid a string of probes into the administration's efforts to freeze federal funds.

“We have, right now, 39 different investigations underway,” Dodaro said during a line of questioning by Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) about the status of GAO’s investigations of potential violations of the Impoundment Control Act by the administration in efforts to withhold some federal funds. 

Dodaro said the agency is working to get information from multiple offices as to what “their legal position is for not expending the money.”

“We’re monitoring all the litigation surrounding these areas that we're investigating in only three agencies so far have given us the information that we need,” he said, adding the Office of Management and Budget “has not been responsive,” nor the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and that “a number of other agencies are due to get us information this week or next week.”

The Hill has reached out to the OMB for comment. A spokesperson for the EPA said, “This is news to the agency. We’d be happy to clear up whatever GAO is referring to."

Dodaro appeared before members of the Senate Appropriations Committee as part of a broader hearing focused on reviewing the fiscal year 2026 budget requests for the GAO, the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Publishing Office.

During his testimony on Tuesday, Murray also asked Dodaro what options were available to the GAO if the office doesn’t receive “timely or responsive information from the federal agencies.”

“We’ll have to make decisions then on our own based upon the available information,” Dodaro responded. “Some of it will be in the lawsuit filings that we’re following right now and then we’ll have to go forward doing this. 

"We had to do this in the past in the Interior Department, which didn't respond for a long period of time. Congress put in language then, after that experience, in the appropriation law requiring Interior to give us information within a certain period of time," he said, before suggesting that Congress included similar language in the fiscal year 2026 funding legislation.

Dodaro also said the agency is also looking into “the digital footprint” within major systems across government when pressed about the impact of Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

“We'll have a better idea about what impact DOGE’s access has had on the data systems, and whether there's been any information input into the system or taken out of the system,” he said.

The Trump administration has faced pushback from both sides of the aisle over its targeting of certain funding authorized by Congress. It’s also seen previous efforts to freeze funding approved by Congress caught up in the courts in recent months.

At the same time, conservatives in both chambers are pressing the Trump administration to send a formal request to Congress to approve its proposed funding cuts as Republicans ramp up calls in both chambers for the cuts to be codified into law.

The Hill has reached out to the EPA for comment.