Fifty Out of Fifty-Seven
Congress has a long habit of asking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for answers and then never checking whether any arrive. In 2022 it wrote the checking into law. The fiscal 2023 defense authorization act ordered the Government Accountability Office to send the intelligence committees an annual list of every open recommendation it has made to the Director, and ordered the Director to report back on each one within 120 days. GAO’s fourth such list landed on September 30, and the number ODNI will least want quoted is not the implementation rate.
Of the 57 recommendations still open, ODNI has told GAO it agrees with seven. It partially agrees with none and disagrees with none. On the other fifty, some 88 percent of the pile, it has recorded no position at all, according to the letter’s own response table. That is not quite silence, since the table counts only formal written comments on draft reports, and ODNI has sometimes answered in other ways. But the column that is supposed to say yes or no says neither. GAO, in the restrained register of an auditor who has sent the same email four times, says it encourages ODNI to respond.
The wider ledger is mixed, and fairness requires saying so. GAO has made 139 recommendations to the Director since July 2011, and ODNI has implemented 76 of them, a rate of 55 percent. In the 2023 letter that rate was 31 percent, and GAO now credits the office with a recent push to close recommendations. But the rate still trails the rest of government. Across fiscal 2020 through 2025, agencies implemented 77 percent of GAO’s recommendations, according to GAO’s performance and accountability report, while ODNI managed 47 percent. Six of the open items carry GAO’s priority designation, the short list it thinks deserves the Director’s personal attention.
The Arithmetic of a Growing Pile
The missing answers look different set beside earlier years. In the 2023 letter, 63 recommendations were open, and ODNI had taken a recorded position on 36 of them, with 28 concurrences, six partial concurrences and two disagreements. It had recorded none on 27. This year it has a recorded position on seven of 57.
The simplest explanation is a survivor effect. Recommendations ODNI agreed with were the likeliest to be finished and closed, so what remains is weighted toward the ones it never took a position on. That is an inference, not something GAO says, but it fits the numbers.
The pile is also getting bigger. GAO’s 2025 letter counted 122 recommendations, 44 of them open and six closed for other reasons, which leaves 72 implemented. This year’s letter counts 139, with 57 open, six closed for other reasons and 76 implemented. By those figures ODNI implemented four recommendations in twelve months while seventeen new ones arrived, the open count rose by thirteen, and the overall implementation rate slipped from 59 percent to 55. ExecutiveGov reported last year that ODNI agreed with seven recommendations and did not comment on the rest. A year on, the agreements still number seven.
Even the priority list resists a flattering reading. It went from 14 recommendations in May 2025 to six today, but GAO’s July letter describes the change as GAO removing the designation from eight, adding one, and ODNI implementing one. The work did not vanish. The label did.
What a Missing Answer Is Worth
A missing position is not always a refusal, and the letter is careful on the point. GAO records ODNI’s position only where ODNI gave formal written comments on a draft report, and where it did not, GAO says it cannot report a position. The count measures paperwork. It cannot see a phone call, a classified reply, or a letter that arrives after the report is published. In the clearance audits GAO has done in recent years, for example, ODNI declined to say whether it agreed, then argued in writing that some of the recommendations were untenable or not feasible. A no on the record would have been easier to count.
Consider three recommendations from a January 2024 report on employees with disabilities who work in secure facilities. GAO asked the Director to set minimum accessibility specifications for automatic door openers, accessible locks and intrusion detection systems, and tactile signage; to fold accessibility into the annual inspection of sensitive compartmented information facilities; and to get accrediting agencies reporting their facility inventories on time. The letter lists ODNI’s response to the public report as no comment. A footnote then adds that in March 2024 ODNI told GAO it concurred with the recommendations in the sensitive companion report. So ODNI said yes on paper in March 2024, and in September 2026 GAO still lists all three as open, one of them only partially addressed.
Older still are two recommendations from a 2022 report on commercial satellite imagery. GAO asked the Director to make sure the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office set performance goals and measures for using commercial imagery, and to get roles defined for commercial analytic services. ODNI’s recorded response is no comment, and four years on both remain open. A classified version of that report carries the same recommendations.
Either reading is uncomfortable. If the missing position means refusal, the Director is declining to tell an auditor yes or no. If it means the paperwork was never filed, then the one record the committees rely on to see where the Director stands has a hole in it, and that hole covers nearly nine in ten open items. And when the real answer does arrive, it sometimes arrives later, by letter, and is no.
A Deadline Buried in a Footnote
The statute gives the Director 120 days after receiving GAO’s list to report what has been done and what will be. GAO sent the last list on September 29, 2025. Footnote 3 of this year’s letter dates ODNI’s response to May 2026. One hundred twenty days from late September lands in late January. If GAO received the response when the footnote dates it, it arrived months late. GAO gives only a month, not a receipt date, so the gap is a question rather than a finding, but it is a question the committees could settle with a phone call.
It matters because that response is the one place ODNI’s plans for each recommendation are supposed to live in writing. The next one is due in late January 2027, which gives readers a date to watch.
The law covers two more September letters after this one, in 2027 and 2028, unless Congress extends it. The committees have now received four of these lists. Each has arrived with the same basic message, that the Director’s office is being asked a great many questions and is putting very few answers on the record. Congress built a mailbox. Somebody ought to ask who is supposed to empty it.
