Congress cannot check what it cannot see

DOCUMENTED FACT A recommendation stays open until the agency acts on it. These are not disputes about what happened. They are findings the VA has accepted or declined to close, written by the two bodies Congress created to audit it.

The oversight witness put the practical point plainly: these open items are themselves the agenda. S191

These open recommendations provide an opportunity for the committee to conduct oversight. The committee should be asking the VA what they are doing to implement the remaining recommendations.

Tim Stretton, Project On Government Oversight, testimony to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, May 20 2026

PROJECT ANALYSIS For families in this record, that is the difference between an inquiry that closes with a letter and one that closes with a change. A congressional office asking VA to explain a specific open recommendation is asking a question the agency has already conceded the substance of.

DOCUMENTED FACT The Government Accountability Office has had no Senate-confirmed comptroller general since Gene Dodaro retired at the end of 2025. Under the GAO Act of 1980 the post is filled by presidential nomination from a slate put forward by a bipartisan congressional commission. As of the May 20 2026 testimony, no slate had been put forward and no nominee named. S191

DOCUMENTED FACT In the same period, the House Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee voted along party lines to cut GAO's budget by roughly 25 percent, about 200 million dollars, which the testimony estimates would mean eliminating around 1,000 jobs. GAO had requested a 5.9 percent increase. S191

DOCUMENTED FACT Across the federal government, 28 inspector general posts sit vacant, 21 of them with no nominee. Several have been vacant across more than one administration, one for nearly seven years. The VA is not among them: it has a permanent Senate-confirmed inspector general. S191

The return on that spending is not in dispute. Inspectors general across the government returned 17 dollars for every dollar spent in fiscal 2025, and the VA OIG reported 18 dollars for every dollar in its most recent semiannual report. S191

PROJECT ANALYSIS This is the part that touches this record directly. The reports families and congressional offices are waiting on are produced by offices that are losing staff, leadership, or both. A report that arrives late, or thinner than it should be, is not evidence that nothing was wrong. It is evidence about the office that wrote it.

DOCUMENTED FACT In fiscal 2025 the VA made 287.95 billion dollars in awards: 203.04 billion in direct payments, 90.74 billion in contracts, 3.12 billion in grants, 1.01 billion in loans and 2.47 billion in other assistance. S191

The testimony is careful that none of this is an allegation. Its argument is that the size of the taxpayer investment is what makes routine scrutiny necessary, and that sole-source and single-bid awards are where scrutiny usually starts.

DOCUMENTED FACT Congress has not reauthorized key components of the VA for roughly three decades; those parts operate under expired authorizations of appropriation. The Congressional Budget Office counted 1,326 authorizations that expired at the end of fiscal 2025, including 457 covering about 500 billion dollars of fiscal 2025 spending. S191

This record exists because a program failure ran for years while the bodies meant to catch it were asking about other things. The oversight testimony makes the same point from the institutional side, and it is worth stating in its own words.

However, the most important oversight Congress can conduct is frequent routine oversight. This includes regularly asking agencies how laws are being implemented, how taxpayer dollars are being spent, and whether programs are functioning as intended.

Tim Stretton, Project On Government Oversight, testimony to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, May 20 2026

PROJECT ANALYSIS Two things on this page are usable by anyone with a congressional office on the phone. First, an open OIG or GAO recommendation is a question the agency cannot answer with a denial, because the finding is already on its own books. Second, a bipartisan request is treated differently from a one-party one, and requests from individual members who do not chair a committee can be, and are, declined outright under a standing executive branch legal opinion.

DOCUMENTED FACT That last point is not a matter of custom. A 2017 Office of Legal Counsel opinion does not recognise individual members of Congress as having oversight authority, and the executive branch treats their requests case by case. Senator Grassley's stated position is that the opinion has, in his words, no legal or Constitutional basis, and that the Constitution does not mention committees or committee chairmen at all. S191

PROJECT ANALYSIS For a family whose case is being carried by one member's office rather than a committee, that opinion is the reason a request can go unanswered without anyone breaking a rule. It is worth knowing before you conclude that silence means your case was weak.

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Source for this page: the testimony of Tim Stretton, director of the Congressional Oversight Initiative at the Project On Government Oversight, to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs hearing on H.R. 6733, the VISN Reform Act of 2025, and other pending legislation, May 20 2026. Registered as S191. Every figure above is stated in that testimony as of the date shown, and is a watchdog's reading of the agencies' own public trackers rather than a government finding. The Senate hearing at which the Secretary named the June 15 2026 partial claim date was the same day; his written statement for it is registered as S190 and the exchange itself is on Who is engaged.