Title:  How GAO Serves Congress

Description: On this special episode of the podcast, we sit down with GAO’s Managing Director of Congressional Relations Nikki Clowers to discuss how GAO serves Congress. 

Related work: GAO.gov 

Released: August 2025

{Music}

[Nikki Clowers:] We work every day to serve Congress to help them carry out their constitutional responsibilities.

[Holly Hobbs:] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report. Your source for fact-based, nonpartisan news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. I'm your host, Holly Hobbs. Today's episode of the Watchdog Report is special. Most episodes of our podcast focus on new GAO reports and findings. But today's episode kicks off a new series about GAO itself. In this series, we'll talk with leadership about our mission, our independence, and how we do our work for Congress. Today's episode focuses on GAO’s mission to support Congress in carrying out its constitutional responsibilities. In other words, how we work for Congress. We'll learn more from GAO’s Managing Director of Congressional Relations Nikki Clowers. Thanks for joining us.

[Nikki Clowers:] Thanks for having me.

[Holly Hobbs:] Nikki, maybe we can start with, when we say we work for Congress, what does that mean? What does that look like day-to-day?

[Nikki Clowers:] The day-to-day is pretty exciting. When we say we work for Congress, we mean it. Everything that we do is to help Congress carry out its constitutional responsibilities and help them provide oversight of the executive branch. When you think about what we do at GAO, 95% of everything that we work on is driven by Congress. Either they've asked us to do it through a request, or they've directed us to conduct a study in a law or maybe a committee report. And it's exciting because Congress asks us to work on issues of national importance—things that affect our nation's well-being, as well as your neighbors’ well-being, your family’s, your community’s. So everything from transportation policy to military readiness, to securing nuclear weapons, to food assistance, Congress comes to us and asks us to review these issues and provide them advice and analysis. And importantly, that analysis and advice is nonpartisan. It's objective. It's reliable. It's information that they can use to help inform their decision making.

[Holly Hobbs:] About how many requests do we get from Congress each year? 

[Nikki Clowers:] It varies each year in terms of how many requests we might get from Congress. Anywhere between 550 to 700. Over the last few years, it's been an average of about 630 requests and mandates that we get. And so when you look at that number, about half are mandates. And when I say mandates, I mean they’re study requirements—that are written in law, they're in a conference report or a committee report—that, again, includes a provision that GAO, you shall review this for us or they're request from committee leadership, either the chair or ranking member. And because we're nonpartisan, we treat those equally. If it's a request from the chair or a request from ranking member, we will go off and do that work for them. Mandates, by their nature, are bipartisan because we report to both the ranking member and the chairman. And throughout the process, we're briefing the staff as we conduct our study. And mandates account for about half of our workload. The other half are the requests from committee leadership, and about a third of those are bipartisan as well. 

[Holly Hobbs:] So how are we required to do something through a mandate? What that would look like?

[Nikki Clowers:] Any time there's significant pieces of legislation, big pieces of legislation, they usually contain dozens of GAO mandates. Last year, the FY24 NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, included 95 mandates for GAO to do work. The recent FAA reauthorization bill included 30-plus mandates. So there's often a large body of work that Congress is asking us to do when they pass legislation that is significant, maybe directing changes or providing a lot of funding. They want us to provide oversight of those new programs of that spending. We also have about 150 mandates that are recurring in nature, meaning that we are to report every year, maybe every other year. So what I'm describing is a pretty high workload. 

[Holly Hobbs:] Given that workload, how do we decide what to prioritize?

[Nikki Clowers:] So, that really goes to the congressional protocols. We established those about 25 years ago working with Congress. And it really sets up a shared expectations between us and Congress and how we're going to work together. Establishes a rules of the road, if you will. And what it says is we give the highest priority to mandates, anything in law or committee reports. That's what we'll tackle first. The second is request from committee leadership—again chair, ranking members. And the third is member request. Because of the volume of mandates we get and the requests from committee leadership, we're not able to get to member request. So, what we do to try to help member offices is provide technical assistance and other services.

[Holly Hobbs:] So that's just our reports, but we do lots of other things for Congress too, right?

[Nikki Clowers:] We did a lot more. I think we are known for our reports, especially back when we would print them and they would be blue covered and people would wave around a blue covered GAO report. I think some of our listeners wouldn't maybe remember that or know that.

[Holly Hobbs:] I wouldn’t remember that, it predates me.

[Nikki Clowers:] But we would print them and they were this distinctive blue cover. But we do so much more than reports. First, we testify at congressional hearings throughout the year. Usually at least 60 times a year, which makes us one of the most frequently sought after witnesses on the Hill. We conduct financial audits, we’re the financial auditor for about a half a dozen federal agencies. We are also responsible for auditing the consolidated financial statements of the United States government. We conduct technology assessments, which are studies where we assess the emerging technology to determine what are the risks, what are the costs, what are the benefits, and how mature that technology is. In addition, we conduct investigations where we look for fraud, waste, and abuse. We also have an important legal function that Congress has given us and directed us to do, where we look at issues and report on issues related to the Congressional Review Act, the Impoundment Control Act, the Vacancy Act, as well as other appropriation law matters. There's a book that the federal agencies use across government. It's red and it's called the Principles of Appropriations Law. Our attorneys literally wrote that book. They're experts in that field. And so, Congress has turned to us and all these sort of legal functions and asked for us to provide advice and provide opinions. 

[Holly Hobbs:] You also mentioned “technical assistance.” What exactly is that?

[Nikki Clowers:] This is informal assistance that we provide, Congress. What I often tell to congressional offices, it's an informal ask and so you get an informal response back. It's something that we can do very quickly, usually less than 5 days. And it might be to analyze publicly available data to prepare questions for them to use in a hearing, to ask potential witnesses. It might also be to review draft legislation that, you know, they'll call us and ask, and you review this to make sure it's hitting the mark. And so, we do a lot of technical assistance. Last year in fiscal year 2024, we provided about 1,100 instances of technical assistance across the Congress. In addition to the technical assistance, we also send staff on details to congressional committees at their request. We can detail a GAO staff person up to a year to a committee to help support the committee's legislative or oversight agenda. And that's extremely popular. Over the last 5 or so years, we've detailed about 180 staff to 49 different committees, both in the Senate and the House.

[Holly Hobbs:] So we send staff to the Hill to work. Are they being asked to work on legislation?

[Nikki Clowers:] They can be asked to work on legislation. They can be asked to work on different oversight projects. One of the things we set expectations for the committees, and they understand they know us well—when we send staff up, they're still working in a nonpartisan role. So they're collecting the facts, doing the analysis and providing that to the committee. So it informs their actions.

[Holly Hobbs:] So Congress isn’t nonpartisan. How does GAO ensure it stays nonpartisan?

[Nikki Clowers:] It is core to who we are. It's core to who we are as independent auditors. We follow Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards, which we refer to as the Yellow Book. And at the heart of the Yellow Book is that auditors need to be independent and they need to be nonpartisan. And so from day one, we train our employees about how to navigate a partisan environment, how to ensure that they're acting in a nonpartisan way? How do we ensure that the products are nonpartisan? And as you can imagine, we have a number of controls in place to ensure our products are nonpartisan. We have a great deal of training for our employees about being nonpartisan and what to watch for, as well, as we have a really robust what we call a quality assurance framework, that all of our products must go through different stages of reviews where we bring in subject matter experts like attorneys or methodologists. Supervisors review it each step of the way and one of the things they're looking for is the objectivity, making sure that it is nonpartisan, that it's free from bias. And so when we issue a product, it's an institutional product that we're putting out, and we can stand behind it. And we know that it's objective, reliable, and nonpartisan. But as you said, we are working in a partisan environment and not often what we get asked to do might be framed through a partisan lens. So the request for us to study something might have a slant to it. And so one of the first things we do when we get a request, we go up and we talk to committee staff about the work and how we're going to frame it in an objective way. So they might have included a lot of adjectives and sort of opinions about the program. And we take what the core issue is, and we develop an independent research design and methods about how we're going to go study the program in an objective way. 
I often, when I'm talking to congressional staff, I remind them that they can ask us anything. They can ask us to do anything, but they can't tell us how to do it. They can't tell us how to design the work and what we should find because that interferes with our independence and our nonpartisan role. And, what I find in these conversations is that staff and members, they get it. And they want us to be nonpartisan because they know. Us being independent and nonpartisan is so important for them to be able to rely on the work and to be able to use our work to convince others to take action.

[Holly Hobbs:] Nikki, we're talking to you because you lead GAO's Office of Congressional Relations. How does that office fit into our work for Congress?

[Nikki Clowers:] We have a small team within GAO that focuses on congressional relations. How I often describe our role is that we manage the institution's relationship with Congress. We have 535 clients on the Hill. My office's job to make sure that we understand congressional priorities, that we're checking in to make sure that we're meeting their needs and that we are communicating that back to the agency as well. Another important function of the office is we do a lot of outreach and education, both to committees and member offices. And they can serve different purposes. Some of the outreach is just to make sure they understand of all the services that we provide—some of the things we've talked about like technical assistance—that they can call us up if they have quick turnaround needs, that we can fulfill them. And so we want to make sure that they know that and that they're using that services if they want it. The other thing that we do, we do a lot of education or training programs. We're up on the Hill. We have space in the Longworth Office Building. And each month we put on probably 1 to 2 different training events where we bring in our subject matter experts across GAO and offer to discuss our work in a particular area or provide training on a particular topic, whether it's artificial intelligence or disaster assistance. And we make that available to all staff across Congress so they can come in and talk to people that have been working on these issues for decades.

[Holly Hobbs:] Last question, what should people know about GAO and our work for Congress?

[Nikki Clowers:] I think you said it part of the answer right there. We work for Congress. We are working on congressional priorities. When we show up to an agency for an audit, we're there because Congress has asked us to review something. They need information. And they trust us to get it—and trust us to provide that information in a nonpartisan, objective, fact-based way. And in helping Congress carry out their constitutional responsibilities providing that information and analysis, we're helping improve government. We're making government work better. We're identifying ways for it to be more efficient, more effective, ways we could do things smarter and cheaper. And at GAO we have a long history of successfully carrying out that mission.

[Holly Hobbs:] That was Nikki Clowers talking about our work for Congress. Thanks for your time, Nikki.

[Nikki Clowers:] Thank you.

[Holly Hobbs:] And thank you for listening to the Watchdog Report. To hear more podcasts, subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen and make sure to leave a rating and review to let others know about the work we're doing. For more from the congressional watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, visit us at GAO.gov.