Each week, The Investigative Journal surveys new reports from government auditors, inspectors general, and private watchdog organizations across the political spectrum. We note each organization’s orientation and funding for transparency, link directly to the underlying documents and data, and flag findings that merit deeper investigation. All claims below are drawn from the cited public records; TIJ has not independently verified the underlying documents beyond what is linked.
GAO: Effects of $108 Billion Opportunity Zone Tax Break Remain Mostly Unknown
The Government Accountability Office — Congress’s nonpartisan audit agency — reported on August 24 that the effects of the Opportunity Zone tax incentive, created in 2017 to spur investment in low-income communities, are still largely unmeasured. Qualified Opportunity Funds held more than $108 billion in assets as of the end of 2024, according to the report (GAO-26-108132), yet most states surveyed by GAO said they were unsure what the incentive had actually accomplished. About 20 percent of states cited increased job creation and housing as effects.
GAO’s review, based on Census data, a nongeneralizable sample of 16 funds, site visits, and a survey of all states and territories, found the incentive “appears to be mostly funding real estate development” in urban tracts that already had infrastructure and community support. The report notes that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made the incentive permanent, tightened eligibility criteria for future zone designations, created a new rural zone category, and — significantly for oversight — added reporting requirements that could finally allow the government and the public to assess where the money goes. The full 84-page report and a one-page highlights summary are available from GAO.
ProPublica: The Army’s $533 Million Artillery Plant That Produced Nothing
ProPublica — a nonprofit, foundation-funded investigative newsroom generally regarded as left-of-center, with nine Pulitzer Prizes — published a takeaways piece on August 26 distilling its investigation into a taxpayer-funded artillery plant project involving General Dynamics. According to the original August 12 report by Jesse Coburn, taxpayers funded a $533 million plant intended to boost artillery production that ultimately made nothing.
The reporting is part of ProPublica’s ongoing series “The $1 Trillion Black Box,” which examines how the Pentagon spends its budget and why so little of that spending is traceable in public records. Whatever one makes of the outlet’s broader editorial choices, the underlying question — how a half-billion-dollar defense industrial investment can fail to deliver — is squarely within the accountability lane this column exists to track, and the series’ documentation is worth reading alongside the Army’s and contractor’s responses as reported there.
DOJ Inspector General: DEA Contract Office 83 Percent Understaffed, $2.9 Million Flagged
The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General — a statutorily independent internal watchdog — released an audit on August 20 of four task orders totaling $20 million that the Drug Enforcement Administration awarded to Ocean Bay Information and Systems Management, LLC, for support of the DEA’s Diversion Control Program, which polices the legal pharmaceutical supply chain.
The audit found the contractor generally provided the agreed-upon services, but the OIG said it could not determine whether contract workers performed only allowable diversion-related work — or whether the services meaningfully contributed to the program at all. The report identified more than $2.9 million in potential “funds to be put to better use,” tied to contract workers who did not appear to meet education or experience qualifications, plus travel costs paid without required pre-approvals. According to the OIG’s press release, the DEA’s contracting office was 83 percent understaffed, and DEA personnel dictated contractor hiring decisions through “meet-and-greets” despite policy prohibiting exactly that. The OIG made 11 recommendations; the DEA agreed with all of them and has already resolved four — a right of reply worth noting. The full report (26-080) is posted.
POGO: ICE Detention Inspections Show Rising Grades as Deaths in Custody Climb
The Project On Government Oversight — a nonpartisan nonprofit funded primarily by foundations and individual donors, whose news arm asserts editorial independence — published a data investigation on August 18 examining ICE’s internal Office of Detention Oversight. Working with American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, POGO compiled a dataset of 500 initial inspection reports covering 174 facilities from fiscal year 2022 through July 23, 2026 — a dataset ICE itself does not publish.
The numbers are striking: recorded standards violations fell nearly 70 percent between fiscal 2022 and 2025, and roughly 74 percent of fiscal 2026 inspections have produced a “Superior” rating, the data shows. Over the same period, no dedicated ICE facility failed an inspection, and of six facilities that failed twice in a row — the statutory trigger for defunding — five remain in use, according to POGO’s analysis. Meanwhile, ICE reported 33 deaths in custody in 2025, and 23 so far in 2026 as of August 11, per the article. ICE did not respond to POGO’s requests for comment; facility contractors LaSalle Corrections and CoreCivic disputed detainees’ specific allegations, and CoreCivic said its medical care receives “layered, continuous oversight.” Readers should weigh that the investigation leans on accounts from former officials and detainees alongside the inspection data itself — which is downloadable and checkable.
Judicial Watch: Court Orders Answers on FBI “Burn Bag Room” Records by September 4
Judicial Watch — a conservative, donor-funded 501(c)(3) that litigates Freedom of Information Act cases — announced on August 21 that a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to answer questions about a large volume of FBI records discovered in a room at FBI headquarters. Court filings indicate the room contains 20 five-drawer filing cabinets holding an estimated 950,000 to 1.9 million pages.
According to the order in Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:25-cv-04047), the parties must report by September 4 on whether the records were previously reviewed under other FOIA requests, whether they exist in other record systems, and what two investigations are reflected in the older “legacy” files. In July, the department told the court that at a processing rate of 500 pages a month, the records would take roughly 158 years to review. Whatever the records ultimately show, the procedural question — how a records cache of this size sat outside normal FBI record systems — is a legitimate transparency issue on its own terms.
Capital Research Center: $638 Million in 501(c)(3) Voter Registration Spending in 2024
The Capital Research Center — a conservative think tank that investigates left-of-center philanthropy — published an analysis by Parker Thayer on August 24, drawn from its forthcoming report “The ‘Charities’ Influencing Elections: 2024 and Beyond.” Reviewing IRS filings for more than 80 of the largest tax-exempt voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups, CRC found the sample raised $633.3 million and spent $638.7 million in 2024 — a roughly 30 percent nominal spending increase over 2020, or about 10 percent after inflation.
CRC’s characterization of the network as “Democrat-favoring” is its own editorial judgment, and readers should treat the framing accordingly; the organization has posted its underlying spreadsheet of 2020–2024 filings, which allows independent checking. The filings-based core finding — that nonprofit voter mobilization spending grew in real terms even as inflation-adjusted traditional PAC spending declined, per OpenSecrets data CRC cites — raises a structural question about the migration of election-adjacent spending into the charitable sector that deserves scrutiny regardless of which side’s donors are writing the checks.
OpenTheBooks: $460 Billion in HUD Spending, Affordability Gap Barely Moved
OpenTheBooks — a right-of-center 501(c)(3) transparency organization that databases government spending via FOIA — released a report, “Extreme Makeover: American Dream Edition,” analyzing a decade of housing data. Using Census Bureau income data and the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index, the group found that home prices outpaced median household income growth in all 50 states from 2015 to 2024, with double-digit gaps in 48 states — despite more than $460 billion in Department of Housing and Urban Development spending across 18 housing programs over the same period, as The Center Square reported.
By the group’s calculation, that spending correlated with a statistically insignificant 2.75 percent reduction in the affordability gap. California received the most HUD money in the sample at over $80 billion; Idaho posted the worst affordability trend, with home prices growing 151 percent against 68 percent income growth. Correlation is not causation — HUD programs serve renters and the homeless as much as prospective buyers — but the mismatch between program scale and the headline affordability outcome is a fair subject for congressional appropriators.
Also Notable: CRS Refreshes Its Government Shutdown Explainers Ahead of September 30
The Congressional Research Service — Congress’s nonpartisan in-house research arm — updated its explainer “Government Shutdowns: Legal Causes in Brief” in mid-August, alongside related products on executive branch operations during funding lapses. The refresh is timely: appropriations for fiscal 2027 lapse September 30, and CRS’s shutdown resources compilation records that the current fiscal year began with a Homeland Security funding lapse in February. The documents are short, sourced, and useful background for the funding fight Congress returns to next week.
What Warrants Deeper Investigation
Three threads from this week’s crop stand out for TIJ follow-up. First, the Opportunity Zone reporting requirements created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: once Treasury begins publishing fund-level investment data, it should be possible to test — with numbers rather than anecdotes — whether the incentive reaches distressed communities or subsidizes deals that would have happened anyway. Second, the gap POGO documented between ICE inspection ratings and deaths in custody invites a records request for the Office of Detention Oversight’s rating worksheets, which even GAO says it could not obtain. Third, the DOJ OIG’s finding of an 83 percent understaffed DEA contracting office raises an obvious system-level question: how many other DOJ components are administering multimillion-dollar contracts with skeleton acquisition staffs? Filings indicate the September 4 joint status report in the Judicial Watch FBI records case will also merit a close read.
Transparency note: organizational orientations above reflect each group’s public positioning and funding disclosures. Findings are attributed to the originating organizations and their cited records; where subjects of reporting responded, those responses are noted. Corrections: editor@tij.news.