GAO Report

The Government Accountability Office conducts audits of federal programs and publishes reports with findings and recommendations. The audited agency responds in an appendix, typically with the phrase 'the department concurs' — agreeing with the finding and committing to address it. Concurrence is the path of least resistance: it costs nothing, generates no headlines, and lets the finding age into irrelevance. The recommendations sit with a status marked as 'open,' and the next GAO report finds them still sitting there and recommends the same things again. The cycle is not adversarial — the GAO auditors are careful, fair, and usually right. The program office knows the findings are valid. Everyone agrees on what is wrong. The song's point is that agreement on the diagnosis has never been the bottleneck. The system knows exactly what ails it. Concurrence is the sound a system makes instead of work.