The Investigative Journal’s weekly survey of notable public records — government audits, watchdog findings, and newly released documents and datasets — for the week of July 20, 2026. Every item below links to its primary source. Figures are drawn from official reports; where matters remain contested or unresolved, we say so.
A steady stream of oversight documents reached the public record over the past two weeks, led by a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit finding that most of the roughly $14 billion committed to rebuilding Puerto Rico’s electricity grid remains undisbursed nearly nine years after Hurricane Maria. State and local auditors added their own findings — most prominently a 2,603-page North Carolina investigation into spending in the town of Cary — while federal declassifiers and statistical agencies pushed new documents and data into public view. Here is what the records show.
Federal Audits: The Government Accountability Office
Puerto Rico grid: $14 billion committed, little spent
In a report publicly released in early July (GAO-26-107772), the GAO found that FEMA, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Energy have together obligated about $14 billion for Puerto Rico’s grid recovery and modernization since 2017, but that only a fraction has actually been disbursed. Of roughly $11.1 billion obligated by FEMA, about $2.7 billion had been paid out, the audit found — largely for equipment, materials, and architecture-and-engineering work rather than completed construction.
The records indicate that physical progress has been similarly limited. As of February 2026, the report states, about 400 miles of an estimated 16,000 miles slated for vegetation clearing had been cleared using federal funds, and nine large FEMA-funded projects had been completed. GAO attributes the pace to cumbersome project-review processes, staff turnover, funding complexities, and uncertainty among the many entities involved. The report includes recommendations to improve federal coordination; agency responses are documented within it.
The disbursement gap is the kind of “follow-the-money” question that rewards sustained scrutiny, and the underlying data — obligated versus disbursed, by agency and project — is laid out in the report for readers who want to trace it.
Nuclear cleanup costs keep climbing
A cluster of 2026 GAO reports on the Department of Energy’s environmental cleanup program paints a picture of costs that continue to escalate. The department oversees more than $500 billion in major projects and activities to clean up radioactive and hazardous waste, and GAO found that combined costs for the most expensive operations activities rose by roughly $75 billion, and capital-asset project costs by more than $2 billion, since the office last reported in 2022. Annual maintenance costs for aging facilities have nearly doubled since fiscal 2020, to more than $950 million.
In GAO-26-108193, auditors warned that DOE risks “prematurely excluding less expensive options” when planning large projects — recommending the department identify a need before committing to a particular solution. A companion report, GAO-26-108018, found that clarifying the definition of high-level radioactive waste could allow DOE to save tens of billions of dollars; a 2020 departmental estimate cited by GAO put potential savings from reclassifying a portion of Hanford Site tank waste at $73 billion to $210 billion. Related reports address cost-and-schedule accuracy (GAO-26-107820) and aging infrastructure (GAO-26-107957).
Federal Oversight: The Watchdogs’ Watchdog
GAO finds gaps in how inspectors general are policed
One of the more striking accountability records now in public view concerns the system meant to investigate the federal government’s own inspectors general. In GAO-26-107922, the GAO found that the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s Integrity Committee frequently fell short of its own procedural requirements when handling misconduct allegations against agency watchdogs. Federal law requires such investigations to be completed within 150 days; of five completed investigations GAO examined, covering October 2020 through March 2025, none met that deadline, with case lengths ranging from 427 to 1,246 days.
According to the report, the Integrity Committee received more than 16,200 complaints between 2020 and 2025 but completed 15 investigations over that period. GAO also documented instances in which final investigative reports did not fully reflect the conclusions of the assisting inspector general’s office, and cases in which required updates to Congress were not always provided when deadlines were exceeded. GAO directed recommendations to strengthen oversight and policy; the committee’s response is included. Independent coverage of the findings is available via Government Executive.
The report has already generated congressional follow-through: the House Oversight Committee set a mid-July deadline for documents including the actions taken to address GAO’s findings and a plan to fix the identified problems. Separately, the Department of Justice’s inspector general continues to publish routine oversight work — its reports page lists recent audits of the department’s compliance with payment-integrity reporting requirements and of its information-system inventory management.
State and Local Records
North Carolina: a 2,603-page probe of spending in Cary
North Carolina State Auditor Dave Boliek released an investigative report (INV-2026-CARY) on July 16 examining finances and workplace culture in the town of Cary. The report questions more than $1 million in purchases made under former Town Manager Sean Stegall and describes weak internal controls over spending. Auditors flagged specific expenditures, including reported figures of $108,714 for mailing flyers about council district changes, $120,314 for video production tied to a 2024 retreat, and $65,656 for a ghostwriter engaged to write about Stegall’s management style, according to the report and contemporaneous coverage.
The records also point to unusually broad use of government purchasing cards: the report indicates nearly two-thirds of Cary employees held procurement cards — compared with an average of about 16 percent across nine other large North Carolina municipalities — and that employees recorded more than $24 million in card transactions over two years. The auditor’s analysis flagged some charges as potentially problematic and made 13 recommendations, from tightening procurement-card policy to strengthening financial-reporting controls.
Context matters here. The auditor’s report questions expenses and describes an “intimidating” work environment, but such a review identifies control weaknesses and questioned costs rather than adjudicating criminal liability. Stegall was placed on paid administrative leave and resigned in December 2025. The report’s recommendations, and the town’s stated intent to respond, are part of the public record for readers weighing the findings.
Routine local audits: Ohio’s semiweekly releases
Not every accountability record is a headline. Ohio Auditor of State Keith Faber’s office, which audits more than 6,000 public entities, publishes audit results on a semiweekly basis. Its early-July release advisory listed dozens of local financial audits and two “Findings for Recovery” — the mechanism Ohio uses to identify public money owed back — at Mount Gilead Public Library and at Harrison Township. Full reports are posted to the office’s Audit Search portal. These routine releases are a reminder that the densest accountability data often sits at the county-and-township level, where local reporters and residents are best positioned to act on it.
State-level oversight of large programs also remains an active thread. The Arizona Auditor General’s May 2026 review of the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program — which found the Department of Education “haphazardly” applied a policy auto-approving purchases under $2,000, covering some 2.3 million transactions worth more than $654 million — continues to draw scrutiny and is worth tracking as the department responds (full report).
Document and Data Releases
National Declassification Center posts new release list
The National Archives’ National Declassification Center published a release list covering 137 entries that completed declassification between late March and the end of June 2026. The newly available records span textual materials, moving images, and photographic negatives from both military and civilian agencies — including classified subject files from the U.S. Mission to NATO under Ambassador Harlan Cleveland, U.S. Mission to the United Nations position papers from 1962–1973, and research-and-development technical reports from the Office of the Chief of Ordnance. The records are historical, but for researchers they represent a fresh tranche of primary material.
UAP records portal adds a fourth batch
The Department of War’s public UAP records portal (war.gov/ufo) posted its fourth public release in mid-July. According to the portal, the batch adds 23 departmental UAP videos alongside Project Sign and Project Blue Book records, 1955 CIA sighting analyses, materials from a 1949 Los Alamos aerial-phenomena conference, a 2015 incident report from the Pantex Plant, FBI correspondence, and NASA STS-80 imagery. The release is part of an ongoing government effort to move legacy unidentified-anomalous-phenomena files into the public domain, and the underlying documents — rather than secondhand summaries — are the appropriate reference point for anyone reporting on the topic.
Census Bureau refreshes county-level health-insurance data
On the data side, the U.S. Census Bureau published its latest Small Area Health Insurance Estimates, providing single-year estimates of the number of people under age 65 with and without health-insurance coverage in each of the nation’s 3,143 counties. The estimates are broken out by sex, age, and income categories tied to program-eligibility thresholds, with state-level figures also reported by race and Hispanic origin. The bureau separately released May 2026 Current Population Survey basic monthly microdata through its data-access tools. Both are the sort of granular, machine-readable datasets that make local accountability reporting possible; the Census Bureau’s latest-releases page tracks new products as they post.
Records That Warrant a Closer Look
Several of this week’s records merit deeper investigation. The Puerto Rico disbursement gap — $2.7 billion paid against $11.1 billion obligated, with 400 of 16,000 miles cleared — invites a project-by-project accounting of where the money has and has not moved. The Department of Energy’s potential $73 billion-to-$210 billion swing on Hanford waste classification raises questions about how cost estimates are built and challenged. The inspector-general integrity findings, paired with the House Oversight Committee’s demand for a corrective plan, will test whether the oversight system can reform itself. And Cary’s procurement-card figures raise an obvious question for other municipalities: how many are issuing purchasing cards to two-thirds of their workforce, and with what controls?
The Investigative Journal will continue tracking these records. Tips and primary documents can be sent to our newsroom. This roundup summarizes public records for informational purposes; readers are encouraged to consult the linked source documents directly.