GOP rep presses Capitol Police Board on outstanding security recommendations

Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) last week said in a letter to the Capitol Police Board that he was “deeply concerned” about what he calls their apparent neglect of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) security recommendations.

“Unfortunately, this lack of action exemplifies my concerns that the Board does not see the value in accountability and transparency,” Davis wrote in the letter, first obtained by Politico.

The letter cites a GAO report from February 2017 that has gone largely unaddressed by the Capitol Police Board. Specifically, the report recommended the Board “fully incorporate leading practices, including evaluating its performance, and engage with stakeholders and incorporate their views,” but the Board “did not state whether it concurred with the recommendation,” according to the letter.

The GAO said that they make recommendations to “improve operations.”

“We make recommendations to help improve operations and we track implementation rates for recommendations from all our reports. So we also do hope they will be implemented,” GAO Managing Director of Public Affairs Charles Young said in an email statement to The Hill. 

Davis added that the Capitol Police Board has “failed to engage or correspond with GAO in any meaningful way” to date. 

Multiple attempts by the GAO to reach out for a status update on their recommendations were ignored. The most recent attempt was in May 2021, more than four years after the recommendations were issued, the letter said.

“We expect the Board to respond to GAO with a complete and detailed description on what updates have or have not been made to the manual by the end of September, and we expect all outstanding recommendations made by GAO to be implemented by the end of this calendar year,” Davis said. 

The Hill has reached out to U.S. Capitol Police and Davis’s office for more information.

Updated at 9:52 a.m.