#4 Governmental agencies operate at the dictate of the Executive Branch continued…
Information for this topic was gleaned from American Politics: ©Marc A. Triebwasser

In continuing with our discussion of congressional oversight this week, we will look at the opportunity for oversight through the three administrative offices within Congress. These offices are the General Accounting Office (GAO), the Congressional Research Service, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The General Accounting Office (GAO) obviously has responsibility for performing accounting audits. However, it also is responsible for judging how various programs are being administered – program evaluation. Therefore, the GAO plays a significant role in congressional oversight.

The Congressional Research Service prepares reports and studies to assist members of Congress. Occasionally these reports will include some information on the activities and performance of various governmental agencies. This provides another source of oversight information for members of Congress.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has the job of gathering information on the budgets of the various agencies and to report on new budgetary requests and suggestions made through the Executive Branch’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This provides extremely important data upon which the various congressional committees can judge the effectiveness of specific governmental programs. Unfortunately, it is the agencies themselves that often use this information for their own purposes in their pursuit of additional funding by going directly to the congressional committee and bypassing the OMB.

These three congressional offices provide vast amounts of information and evaluations of governmental activities. Among the world’s nations the United States Congress has available to it one of the most extensive research staffs. So it is not the lack of information and evaluation that is the problem in oversight. Most often it is the lack of desire to follow through on this information that is lacking. We’ll tackle more on this and other reasons for lack of effectiveness in the oversight process next week.

Dinner Table Discussion Question: How would you like to see these three congressional offices better function to motivate Congress to provide the proper oversight of the various agencies? Compare this system to the private sector.