The Government Accountability Office’s new leader starting later this year, at least on an acting basis, will be a veteran investigator with over three decades’ experience at the nonpartisan legislative branch agency.

Orice Williams Brown, currently the GAO’s chief operating officer, will take the reins from outgoing Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro, whose 15-year term comes to an end Dec. 29 with no sign of movement on a more permanent replacement.

President Donald Trump, who’s had an adversarial relationship with congressional investigators, gets to nominate Dodaro’s successor — an oddity of federal law that has raised separation-of-powers questions and drawn the ire of some GAO veterans.

And if Trump nominates someone viewed as likely to use the agency for political purposes — or

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