For GAO's centennial celebration, we were honored to be able to interview the three most recent comptrollers general of the United States, Chuck Bowsher, Dave Walker and Gene Dodaro, as they looked back at their time at the agency. It became clear that GAO's history is one of foresight and innovation.
When former Comptroller General Chuck Bowsher started at GAO in 1981, he noticed that the agency had evolved quite well over time since its inception in 1921. He saw the agency progress from checking vouchers to doing financial audits, to doing performance audits as well.
So when I came in, I wanted to build on top of what she was doing. And I thought that it was one organization that had evolved or some a lot of other arguments both in the private sector and the government.
They just get stale. They just do what they've always done. And pretty soon it's obsolete. One of the changes he made was crucial to developing the diverse, talented workforce we have today. But when I came here, I decided that we're going to promote by merit and and we started that and especially to promote into the senior
executive service by merit. And just to be blunt about it, by seniority, it was all white men getting promoted. And we had just started in an era of having women and people of color. And some of them were very talented.
So that began the conversion, you might say, to a more diverse GAO. When it comes to the audits themselves. The savings and loan crisis was one issue where GAO sounded the alarm before anyone else knew what was going on.
We were the first ones to report. This is a big problem coming. Lobbyist said, Oh, no, don't worry. But It soon came at a pretty fast, strong pace and we had the Congress had to vote 50 million additions into the thing every six months for a couple of years.
Well, by that time, they were damn scared. Then I was on a lot of the Sunday talk shows explaining what was happening, how it is happening and everything like that. When former Comptroller General, Dave Walker, took the helm he knew what he wanted to focus on. I really wanted us to focus on three things oversight, insight and foresight. So, you know, oversight, which is the traditional role that GAO has played for many decades. Insight. You know, GAO, had done a little bit of work on that.
You know, what works, what doesn't work, best practices, lessons learned, et cetera. And then forsight, which GAO had not done a whole lot of work on foresight, which is looking at the emerging trends and challenges facing the United States, its position in the world, as well as here at home.
What are some of the things that need to be addressed before they reach crisis proportions? He changed the agency's name to better match the services GAO was providing. Well, the General Accounting Office didn't really convey what the agency did.
The agency did accounting for itself, but it didn't do accounting for anybody else. All right. And therefore, that was a challenge in trying to recruit the broad spectrum of people that we need in order to be able to accomplish our objective.
I mean, it didn't hurt us in recruiting accountants, but it hurt us recruiting in other types of professionals, whether it be lawyers, whether it be social scientists, PhDs and a number of different areas, actuaries, et cetera. Secondly, it also was a problem on the Hill because, you know, people said General Accounting Office.
I mean, why would you want the General Accounting Office to do, you know, an in-depth analysis of of a particular policy issue or programmatic activity? I mean, this isn't about accounting. It's about effectiveness, right. Government. We're in the government.
We're in the accountability business, not the accounting business. All right. And accountability includes oversight, insight, foresight and more. It's performance and accountability. And then obviously, we're an office, so we're able to go with Government Accountability Office, maintain GAO, which is, you know, which is really the brand name.
And I think it was very successful. The nation's fiscal health is another issue where GAO made Congress and the public aware of a looming problem. I knew that we face challenges beyond the horizon because of known demographic trends, rising health care costs and a bunch of other challenges that we faced.
And I also knew that the Congress wasn't focusing on that. And so, therefore, I felt that it was important that we do that, that we help people understand some of these forces that were there that were going to take us from surpluses to large and growing deficits unless we ended up, you know, changing course.
Gene Dodaro, the first comptroller general to have risen through the GAO ranks to be appointed from within the agency is no stranger to sounding the warning bells on big issues, the cybersecurity area is something I've long been concerned about since the time I was in charge of our accounting and information technology work in the 90s.
As I mentioned earlier, we designated computer security as a high risk area across our government, 1997. So no one can say, GAO didn't warn people about the implications of this area, both from federal government systems as well as critical infrastructure protection and more recently in protecting the privacy of individuals.
He's also helping to ensure that GAO is on the forefront of auditing innovation. The real time auditing has really come into its own. The global financial crisis, stimulus legislation during the Great Recession, COVID-19 responsibilities, natural disasters and others have really priced a premium on GAO, having the capabilities to do real time auditing and a report on a really frequent basis to the Congress, in some cases on every two months as these efforts unfold. So that's really a new dimension added to our work. And he's still keeping GAO focused on foresight. Also, we're doing more foresight work through strategic planning, our strategic foresight center, trying to alert Congress to emerging issues and to help focus their attention so they have time to think about deliberate and act before problems become a crisis. Science and technology issues are becoming increasingly critical to government operations. Their cybersecurity dealing with a pandemic and so much more. Consequently, GAO has created a special team of experts to deal with these issues.
The science and technology area in the cybersecurity area, I've been very focused on improving our capabilities in those areas. Science and technology is evolving faster at a more rapid pace than any time in human history. And so it's confronting our government and our Congress with important new issues that they need to respond to.
Our mission there has evolved greatly. I've been giving that much attention, support. The Congress has weighed in and given us a lot more encouragement and support and resources lately to expand that science and technology capabilities, to help them understand emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing.
We've set up an innovation lab at GAO to begin testing out new procedures. Throughout all these changes GAO leaders have also tried to ensure that the workplace is a fair and equitable one, where people values are emphasized. Central to my core beliefs is a management philosophy is a commitment to people to make sure that everyone who works at GAO feels valued, respected and treated fairly. This involves a significant effort to focus on this, as well as re-emphasize the importance and continually emphasize the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion issues in GAO. According to our comptroller general GAO is an organization that is capable of evolving and growing with an ever changing government, nation, and world. Looking to that past shows us what the next hundred years could have in store.