A Complete Library of GAO Reports and Metadata • gao

This package gao provides tools for downloading reports and associated metadata published by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO). It ships with a bundled dataset covering over 55,000 reports (1921–present, updated daily) and a one-step function for batch downloading reports as PDF, HTML, or both.

Disclaimer: This package is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. All data is obtained from public web pages at gao.gov.

Installation

gao requires curl-impersonate as a system dependency (GAO.gov uses TLS fingerprint filtering that blocks standard HTTP clients).

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S curl-impersonate

# macOS
brew install lexiforest/curl-impersonate/curl-impersonate

Then install the package:

# From CRAN (when available)
install.packages("gao")

# Development version from GitHub
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("CetiAlphaFive/gao")

Quick start

library(gao)

# Interactive --- prompts for format and year range
auto_download()

# Or specify everything up front
auto_download(format = "pdf", year = 2020:2024, confirm = FALSE)

auto_download() loads the bundled dataset, filters by fiscal year, and downloads PDFs, HTMLs, or both into gao_reports/pdf/ and gao_reports/html/.