Democrats Are Gearing Up to Investigate the Trump Administration. It Won’t Be Easy

In late September, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency titled “DOGE: Congress and the Public Lack Assurance That Systems and Data Were Protected at Multiple Agencies.” In it, the GAO revealed that multiple executive branch agencies had refused to fully cooperate with investigators about the extent and nature of DOGE’s access to sensitive systems and information. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which DOGE and the Trump administration gutted in the early months of the president’s second term, sent GAO a letter accusing investigators of bias and alleging the report was “misleading.” The report, just the latest example of the Trump administration seeking to dodge congressional oversight, raises questions about what—if any—avenues the legislature has to enforce accountability, or even access basic information about what the government has been doing. It does not, however, have the ability to enforce laws or take on prosecution.

Federal agencies don’t necessarily have to enact the agency’s suggestions, but they are legally required to cooperate with GAO’s requests for information and auditing. The GAO and a Democratic congressional aide who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity, though, say that the agencies investigated by the GAO for the DOGE report—the CFPB, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA), the Department of Education, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Small Business Administration (SBA)—all, in one way or another, refused to cooperate with the investigation. The CFPB refused to name all six of the DOGE operatives who were detailed to the agency even though, in February 2025, WIRED identified three of them: Nikhil Rajpal, Chris Young, and Gavin Kliger.

DOGE members Jeremy Lewin and Jordan Wick were also part of the team at the agency. Do you know about what’s happening here? We’d like to hear from you.

Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at velliott88.18. According to the report, both the SBA and the VA “did not respond to requests for information needed to determine the access DOGE team members had to their systems.” Previous reporting from WIRED found that the DOGE affiliate at the VA, Sahil Lavingia, sought to use AI to write code for the agency’s systems, and at the SBA, DOGE affiliates Edward “Big Balls” Coristine and Donald Park were granted broad access to the agency’s financial and loan systems. VA and SBA did not respond to a request for comment.

The Democratic aide says that in addition to the VA and SBA refusing to provide information, several agencies slow-walked their responses to the GAO. The aide says that meeting some resistance within an agency to a GAO investigation is not unheard of, but that responses to the DOGE inquiry represented a “surprising” level of obstruction. If they can't provide X, they provide Y.

If they can't provide Y maybe they could walk investigators through something, or show different things. But there's just a complete lack of willingness to kind of get to yes.” And it’s not just the agencies named in the DOGE report that have been resistant to congressional efforts to investigate. In a statement to WIRED, Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, says that his office was notified by the GAO that the Commerce Department “is refusing to cooperate with my request with Sen.