All posts tagged "Government Accountability Office"

Staffers inside Congress' most powerful watchdog are sounding the alarm as President Donald Trump weighs who should run their agency.

Trump is considering nominating Eric Ueland, the top deputy to Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, to lead the Government Accountability Office as comptroller general, a post that carries a 15-year term, the Washington Sun reported Thursday, citing four people familiar with the discussions.

The pick would put an architect of the Trump administration's spending and workforce moves in charge of the agency that has repeatedly ruled some of those moves illegal. As OMB's number two, Ueland has overseen sweeping changes to the federal workforce, and he also serves as acting head of the Office of Government Ethics and largely dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development....

The United States Government Accountability Office has released a critical report about the U.S. Postal Service, bolstering the findings of a recent Raw Story investigation that details a dramatic spike in crime against letter carriers.

The Government Accountability Office found that “serious crime” — including homicides, assaults, burglaries and robberies — nearly doubled during a six-year span, from 656 in 2017 to 1,198 in 2023. Robberies alone grew nearly sevenfold between fiscal years 2019 through 2023, according to the report.

Raw Story found that letter carrier robberies skyrocketed by 543 percent between 2019 and 2022, coinciding with the timing of a 2020 Postal Service decision that effectively benched its uniformed police force of 450 officers. The decision resulted in the officers losing their mandate to patrol the streets where letter carriers deliver the mail and these robberies often occur. They’re now relegated to protecting postal facilities, such as mail sorting centers and post offices....

When it comes to understanding artificial intelligence and its role in the government, expect to encounter a black box.

Or two.

Or 62....

At the dawn of former President Donald Trump’s administration, government employees and contractors in need of security clearances could wait years for approval. Federal agencies stared down a backlog of 700,000 clearance investigations starting in 2017.

For one former senior-level State Department employee, who is a person of color, they waited more than two years to get approved for a top secret clearance.

When the Trump administration arrived, many new Trump officials received “interim security clearances” because they didn’t initially meet standard security requirements, the former employee told Raw Story. This contributed to a screening backlog. ...

“High-risk.”

That’s how the U.S. Government Accountability Office — an internal watchdog for the federal government — has classified the nation’s security clearance vetting process for the past five years.

The latest report to Congress dropped amid several national security threats from current and former government employees this year alone: 21-year-old airman Jack Teixeira leaked defense documents on a gaming social media site; a jailed neo-Nazi Marine Corps vet allegedly saved classified materials on his computer; a former FBI analyst was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for retaining defense documents in her home....

When news broke that 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard airman Jack Teixeira leaked defense documents on the social network Discord, experts and concerned citizens alike began questioning who vetted this low-level service member who potentially caused grave damage to national security.

The Teixeira saga, which will likely play out for years to come across courtrooms, Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, laid bare how a troubled young man with extremist tendencies needed only a computer and reliable home internet to disseminate government secrets.

But on a more fundamental level, Teixeira’s leaks represent just the dramatic, final failure of an enfeebled national security vetting system that struggles at times to track which employees have access to classified information at all....