The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is looking to gain a better understanding of artificial intelligence so that the watchdog agency can audit the technology, as well as use it to organize its thousands of reports.
U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who oversees GAO, told members of Congress on Wednesday that GAO’s Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team is leveraging its Innovation Lab to research the emerging technology.
The Innovation Lab aims to bring new digital capabilities, such as AI, and evidence-based policymaking techniques to GAO and Congress.
“In our lab, we have technologists, we have data science people, and then we also have people who have worked in actually developing AI models in the private sector or maybe elsewhere in the government,” Dodaro said during a Committee on House Administration Modernization Subcommittee hearing on Sept. 28.
“They’re doing two things, one, to help us figure out how to audit AI … we’re looking now across government [at] the use of AI across government,” he said. “They’ve created an accountability framework on how we can look at governance, data, performance, monitoring issues – so we have criteria now so that we can audit AI. But, we’re also looking at how we can use AI within GAO.”
Dodaro explained that GAO has produced thousands of reports over the years, so the agency has brought in a large language model to help it sort through and better organize the reports into a single database.
“Once we demonstrate the ability to do that, that we’re satisfied that it’s accurate, making that available to Congress and all the staff in the Congress, so they could query questions and go directly to that database,” he explained.
Tim Persons – who served as GAO’s chief scientist and co-director of the Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team until his departure this past year – quoted the inside joke at GAO about the standard pattern of every one of its reports, which is “progress made, but more could be done.”
Persons said that accelerating the modernization of government – and leveraging technologies such as AI – is increasingly important as we enter a new era of the digital age.
“In this era of digital disruption, it’s imperative that GAO and our legislative support agencies modernize processes, technologies, skills, and cultures, not merely to keep pace with the rapidly evolving landscape, but rather to transform with nimbleness and agility to deliver their increasingly important professional services in an anticipatory, content-centric user experience focused manner,” Persons said.
