Can GAO Make Cheney Blink?
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 3, 2001; Page A17
Few would have suspected that David M. Walker would be one of the Bush administration's leading antagonists.
Walker holds as a keepsake the note George H.W. Bush wrote asking him to volunteer in Bush's 1980 campaign for president. Walker has been a delegate to the Republican National Convention and an official in the Reagan administration. He won his current job with the support of Senate GOP leader Trent Lott (Miss.).
And yet Walker, now the U.S. comptroller general, is leading a high-profile battle to force Vice President Cheney to release records from administration energy policy deliberations. Cheney hasn't budged, and Walker, as head of the General Accounting Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- may well take the administration to court.
"This is not a situation where the vice president is resisting the congressmen," Walker said. "He's now resisting the GAO. And his attorneys are engaged in a broad-based, frontal assault on our statutory authority. We cannot let that stand."
Walker, a button-down certified public accountant known more for his critiques of government bureaucracy -- "We're combating stovepiping!" -- than for taking on the White House, has become a pivotal player in a clash of power between the executive and legislative branches. He sees his quest as having gone far beyond where it started last spring when two Democratic lawmakers demanded that Cheney release the data.
It is now, Walker said, a litmus test of the GAO's authority. And he sees what he is doing as a defense of the GAO's reason for being. It's nothing personal, said Walker, a former partner with Arthur Andersen LLP. This battle is not about ideology or party, he said, but about openness and the Constitution.
"The principle at stake here is for the GAO to obtain access to information" so that Congress can exercise the oversight role envisioned by the founding fathers, said Walker, who exudes crispness and efficiency, with French cuffs, wire-rimmed glasses and trim build.
Created in 1921 to keep the federal government's books for Congress, the GAO over the years has shifted away from green-eyeshade work toward program evaluation and investigation. Most of what it does comes at the request of congressional committee chairmen or ranking members, but Walker wants the GAO to do more of its own studies to identify emerging trends and crises before they explode, and give Congress a road map to avert them.
Walker did everything he could, he said, to avoid a confrontation. GAO attorneys spoke with White House attorneys. He spoke with Cabinet officials, though not Cheney, to negotiate the release of the documents.
He does not buy the White House's arguments that to do so would allow the GAO to "intrude into the heart of executive deliberations," as one counsel wrote. Nor does he believe that Cheney has all the facts. If he did, maybe he would relent, Walker said.
For one thing, the GAO does not take up every request from Congress, which Walker said Cheney suggested is the case. Recently, for example, the GAO declined a Democratic request to look into the issue of Salvation Army involvement with the administration's "faith-based" initiative on the grounds that the White House said it did not intend to do anything administratively with it.
So why dig into the energy task force?
"Energy policy is a very, very serious economic matter," Walker said. Legislation is pending. Several agencies are involved, not just the White House. This is at least as significant as Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care task force, the records of which the GAO in 1993 also demanded at the behest of Republicans in the minority.
"If there's a legitimate issue," he said, "then we have an obligation to proceed."
The GAO is looking for who met with whom on the task force, when, with what agenda, and what costs were incurred by Cheney.
"We're not asking for [Cheney's] schedule," Walker said. "We're not asking to interview him. . . . The vice president himself has said he doesn't think anyone's going to be surprised by what's going to come out of this. So my question is, what's the problem?"
In a sense, this showdown with the vice president is Walker's coming out. He was appointed to the job in November 1998 by President Bill Clinton, but only after an agonizing, year-long process in which he became a political pawn, confirmed on the last day of the Senate session only after a deal was struck that allowed him, 24 judges and 14 other nominees through.
Now, with his July 18 demand letter to Cheney, government scholar Paul Light observed, Walker is saying, " 'I'm here. I intend to stay here. And I mean business.' "
"It really is a test of wills," Light said, "and Walker ends up looking more independent and steely-eyed than he did before."
Never before has the GAO, whose staff over the past decade has been almost halved to 3,200, challenged the executive so directly. In the 1970s, it went after President Richard M. Nixon's housing department to get money freed up for spending. In the 1980s, it issued critical reports on the "Star Wars" weapons shield. In the 1990s, it stood firm against the White House in its insistence that there was a huge budget deficit.
But under Walker, a Marine manqué whose office is adorned with military flags (hearing loss in his left ear botched his U.S. Naval Academy physical), the GAO is striving to adjust to its lean lines and become a hard-charging agency.
A GAO lawsuit against the White House for access to records would be a first. Cheney's lawyers have until Aug. 7 to cooperate, or the GAO can issue a report to the White House and Congress and, after 20 days, can proceed to court.
Walker says he still would like to avert a legal battle, but at the same time, he shows no sign of shying from the fight.
"We definitely believe we're on the right side of this issue," Walker said, "and if we go to court, we believe we'll win."
Once a Democratic activist, he switched from Republican to independent when Clinton nominated him. Now, Walker said, he is under "zero" pressure from Republicans to back down. "I am a professional, not a politician," he said.
The White House could block a GAO suit by issuing a "certification" saying that the information sought is part of the "deliberative process" and that its release would "impair substantially" government operations. But that would not stop a congressional committee from issuing subpoenas for the data.
Walker, an outgoing Alabama native who has put futurist Alvin Toffler and retired Gen. Wesley Clark on his GAO advisory board, has brought a new dynamism that has fired up the ranks, staffers say. "There is a sense that we're not just going to roll over and have people rub our tummies like we're little puppies," said one career official.
A few days ago, Walker ran into Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who with Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) began the records fight. Waxman congratulated him on sending the demand letter. "You think I want to hear congratulations from you?" Walker said, issuing a friendly dig. Then he smiled and thanked the congressman.
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