Rep. James Comer, R-Ky, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, offers remarks during an interview in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building. Credit: Rod Lamkey / CNP. Image: Shutterstock
By: FEDweek StaffHouse Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Rep. Jame Comer, R-Ky., has a scheduled a hearing on the GAO’s assessment of agency programs deemed at high risk for mismanagement, fraud and waste, saying it “provides the Trump administration, including DOGE, a roadmap to take on the runaway federal bureaucracy.”
His scheduling of the hearing for February 25 likely means that GAO will soon issue the newest version of that biennial report. “At the hearing, members will evaluate areas in critical need of oversight, highlight vulnerable federal programs, and consider government-wide improvements,” he said.
However, Democrats likely will use the hearing to point out that among GAO’s concerns in all such reports since they started in 2001 is what GAO calls “strategic management of human capital.” Main issues cited have included persistent shortages of federal employees with needed skills in areas such as cybersecurity and other IT functions, the STEM fields in general, acquisition, HR, and others—along with the need for better planning and building up capacity for the workforce of the future.
The prior report said that shortages of employees were “undermining agencies’ abilities to meet their missions.” Closing those gaps “will require demonstrated improvements in agencies’ capacity to perform workforce planning, foster employee engagement, train staff effectively, and recruit and retain the appropriate number of staff with the necessary skills,” it said.
Given that GAO has continued to issue a string of reports raising those same issues over the last two years, that likely will remain on the newest version’s list for consideration at the hearings—which will come amid widespread layoffs of employees in their probationary periods, threats of RIFs to follow, and an ongoing general hiring freeze with a long-term intention to allow filling only one of four positions vacated by normal turnover.
The 2023 report said that over the prior two years progress had been made—one of 16 among the 37 total on the list—but added that progress had been hampered skills gaps at OPM itself—which is among the agencies that recently has laid off many probationary employees and where further cuts have been signaled.
Another federal workplace issue of long-running concern to GAO in such reports involves a topic that Comer and many other Republicans have been stressing, management of federal real property, including the costs of underused space at federally owned or leased facilities. Agencies have shed some of such space in the last several years as offsite work remained at higher levels, although some have been finding that they now lack the space needed to accommodate employees returning to onsite work under the Trump administration’s return to in-person work directive.
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