Comment by Jtsummers
17 hours ago
> now "doge" (GAO)
GAO is not DOGE. For those who don't know the difference between the two, confusing them is about like confusing the President with the Senate. GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive. Its purpose is in its name, and it does a pretty good job of it. It also cannot, on its own (unlike how DOGE was empowered) effect any change. They can only conduct studies and make recommendations, it's up to Congress and the relevant Executive branch agencies to address the recommendations or not.
> (GAO) is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal.
This is not about loosening regulations, it's about DOE Office of Environmental Management not following its own guidance when documenting mission needs (which happen before Analysis of Alternatives (AOA). The problem GAO is identifying here is relatively minor (compared to other problems their other studies have found), but potentially costly, in that they have identified numerous instances of proposing a particular solution too early, which can constrain what's considered later on during the AOA effort.
I suspect parent-poster simply intended to write OMB [0] instead. Perhaps because both initialisms [1] refer to government groups that sometimes publish important reports about budgets.
[0] https://prospect.org/2026/02/05/doge-russell-vought-elon-mus...
[1] Pedantically: Not acronyms, which are spoken like a full word. Ex: FIFA is usually an acronym "feefah", not an initialism "Eff-Eye-Eff-Aye".
A sane and well put together comment. Thank you. This should be the standard for discussion here.
I mixed up some names. The timing doesn't seem coincidental. We are at the end of Executive Order 14301, signed May 2025, which called for at least three test reactors to reach criticality by July 4, 2026.
So immediately after Trumps nuclear power project ends (of which his son's and all his friends are invested in these neo-nuclear power companies), and a bunch of companies reach criticality this week, the government starts issuing orders to make things easier for them to be profitable.
Your naive to think it's anything else other than corruption.
> GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive
I don't know that it's accurate to say such things any more, due to the unitary executive decree by the supreme council. The GAO is intrinsically motivated by law - both to carry out its purpose, and simply to pay its employees - and the supreme council has decreed that all execution of the law is subject to the whims of the president. If the president woke up from his afternoon nap and told GAO employees they weren't going to get paid unless they did a certain thing, it's certainly possible that the supreme council might walk back their earlier decree (although good luck with the payment infrastructure already being pwnt and all that). But it's also possible they might not, given how they've already approved other autocratic dynamics.
They aren't part of the executive branch, period. The president has no control over their pay or performance. Hell, the president doesn't have nearly as much control over the executive branch as you imply, however much he might want it.
> They aren't part of the executive branch, period. The president has no control over their pay or performance.
They are run by the comptroller general who is appointed by the president meaning that the president has total control over who gets paid anything at all. Right now ours is just an "Acting Comptroller General" filling in until the president appoints someone else.
But Congress is very comfortable so far just letting the executive branch do whatever. Even if the orders aren't emanating from the oval office directly, there's clearly a coordinated agenda in motion. It's entirely reasonable to suspect that the GAO has been politicized in that environment.
You've just blindly asserted a whole bunch of things without laying out any sort of supporting arguments. What exactly makes the GAO not "part of the executive branch" ? My understanding is that "branches" are merely a framework used for describing government, not a prescriptive org chart. And how do the GAO's employees get paid, if not by a system that is now under the control of the autocratic Executive?
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> GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive
Ah ah ah, you're describing how things were before Trump v. Slaughter, when the Supreme Court justices ruled that Republican Presidents are allowed to fire the heads of non-executive agencies so long as they are not the Federal Reserve.
You must have missed the Chevron doctrine case where the supreme court took much of the ability for Congress to give away their power to the executive in the guise of creating agencies.
No one is claiming that the recent rulings have been consistent, just that they're making it pretty clear that they're happy to pretty much abolish any semblance of Independency for agencies (other than the Fed, which of course is a great example of how inconsistent they're willing to be in pretending that somehow there's a constitutional basis for it being a special snowflake among all of the other agencies)
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