Donald Trump has accelerated his war on oversight in recent weeks—particularly with the firing of the inspector general who helped touch off his impeachment and the removal of another who’d been tasked with overseeing a $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package. But when it comes to that sweeping legislation signed into law last month, there’s at least one watchdog he won’t be able to elude entirely.

According to Politico on Monday, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office—housed in the legislative branch, outside the president’s purview—is preparing to launch dozens of audits examining both the Trump administration’s overall response to the public health crisis and the historic bill Congress passed to help blunt some of its economic side effects. The office will investigate some of the federal government’s most prominent failures of the pandemic, including its grave and lingering inadequacies in testing, as well as some matters that have received less formal scrutiny so far—such as reports of dead people receiving stimulus checks. “We’re moving forward very quickly,” Angela Nicole Clowers, chief of the GAO’s health care unit, told Politico. “We’re an existing institution and have a lot of institutional knowledge about all these programs. It gives us sort of a leg up.”

Trump has always resisted any kind of checks and balances on his power, and has taken some of his most dramatic steps yet to remove them since being acquitted by the Senate in January—first by purging officials who testified against him, then by sacking Michael Atkinson, the IG who deemed the whistleblower complaint about his efforts to strong-arm Ukraine credible. Days after that termination, which he didn’t even try to disguise as anything but political score-settling, Trump abruptly removed Glenn Fine, who’d been appointed by fellow IG’s to oversee the historic $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill. “Inspectors General are charged with doing independent oversight and exposing corruption,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff wrote at the time. “Their job is to uncover the truth. Exactly why Trump fears them.”

Even if Trump fears the GAO, he won’t be able to fire anyone there, given the office is housed on Capitol Hill and not in the executive branch he runs. He can stonewall the office, as he did when it investigated his decision to withhold Congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine, but he can’t keep them from rendering judgment, both on his administration’s response to the coronavirus crisis and the coronavirus relief bill.

Of course, it’s unclear how much it will matter if the office indeed finds fault in his and his administration’s handling of the crisis; its report that the White House broke the law in holding back aid to Ukraine seemed to confirm what Democrats had concluded when they impeached Trump last year, but that conclusion didn’t matter to the Republicans who ultimately acquitted him. For now, at least, it seems likely that any findings from the GAO are likely to be digested in similarly partisan terms. Still, for a president facing a worsening public health crisis and a November reckoning over his response to it, an independent accounting could highlight known shortcomings and bring others to light— something that could haunt him when he answers to voters this fall.

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