Inspectors General Are Doing Essential—And Unpopular—Work

One afternoon in January 2019, I was summoned to a meeting with the deputy secretary of defense. His massive office was in the outer ring of the Pentagon. Nearby were the offices of the secretary of defense and other top generals and admirals.

The windows looked out over the Pentagon parade grounds and the Potomac River. The Washington Monument appeared in the distance. Seated around the conference table that afternoon were the deputy secretary of defense, the Defense Department’s deputy general counsel, an Army general, and other high-ranking officials.

At the time, I was the acting inspector general (IG) of the Department of Defense. In this role, I had attended many meetings with top Pentagon officials, just as I had with Justice Department officials when I served for more than a decade as the Justice Department’s inspector general. But this meeting was different. Several days earlier, on January 2, the president of the United States had said in a televised Cabinet meeting at the White House that releasing our IG reports to the public was “insane.” That was a first.

[Glenn Fine: The most important public servants you’ve never heard of]

“Some IG goes over there, who are mostly appointed by President Obama—but we’ll have ours too—and he goes over there and they do a report on every single thing that’s happening, and they release it to the public,” President Donald Trump said to Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, referring to reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “What kind of stuff is this? We’re fighting wars, and they’re doing reports and releasing it to the public? Now, the public means the enemy. The enemy reads those reports; they study every line of it.” The president further declared, “Let them do a report, but they should be private reports and be locked up.” He said that releasing the reports “out to the enemy is insane. And I don’t want it to happen anymore, Mr. Secretary. You understand that.”

This essay has been adapted from Glenn Fine’s book, Watchdogs: Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government.

Shanahan had become the acting secretary only a few days earlier, after Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned over differences with the president. Shanahan did not respond to President Trump’s remarks, and the meeting moved on to other topics.

During my time as the Justice IG and the acting Defense IG, I often would make officials in both political parties uncomfortable and upset with reports on government waste, fraud, and abuse. I had been fortunate, however, that neither the White House nor the multiple attorneys general or secretaries of defense with whom I worked had ever tried to interfere with our independent oversight.

Yet I realized that President Trump had the power to retaliate against me and our office. He could try to cut our budget, continue his public criticism, or replace me—a concern that would eventually be realized.

Inspectors General are placed in federal agencies across the government to make those agencies more honest, more efficient, and more accountable, and to detect and deter waste, fraud, and abuse in agency programs. According to the post-Watergate federal law that created the inspector-general system, IGs are independent officials who report problems to their agency head and Congress, and usually release their reports to the public.

In the larger agencies, IGs are appointed by the president and subject to Senate confirmation. The role is designed to be that of a nonpartisan watchdog, not tied to any political party. This is why presidents normally do not remove IGs, either when presidents first take office or during their tenure. This is one of the strengths of our system of IG oversight.

I had served as the inspector general in the Justice and Defense Departments in every presidential administration since President Bill Clinton’s. I was the Justice Department IG from 2000 to 2011, during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. In the tumultuous period following the September 11 attacks, my office regularly published reports about problems in the Justice Department and the FBI (which is part of the department), including mistreatment of detainees following the September 11 attacks and politicized hirings and firings in the department.

After 11 years as the Justice IG, followed by a shorter stint at a law firm, I had returned to government, and since 2016 had been serving as the acting Defense Department inspector general, first in the Obama administration and then in Trump’s. Our Defense IG reports regularly identified waste and fraud in the military’s massive budget and operations, including in the Afghan and Iraq Wars.

Like other inspectors general, I was often criticized when I tried to hold powerful government officials and agencies accountable. But it was unusual for the criticism to come directly from the president, and on national television. President Trump’s comments prompted that January 2019 meeting in the deputy secretary’s Pentagon office.

[David A. Graham: Trump is attacking the final safeguard against executive abuses]

I explained in the meeting in the deputy secretary’s office that, as the Defense Department’s acting IG, I also was designated the lead IG for “overseas contingency operations”—wars around the world. As required by the Inspector General Act, we had to issue quarterly public reports on the status of those wars and other contingency operations. Reports from my office and that of another IG, who was required to report on the use of reconstruction funds in Afghanistan, frequently criticized the progress of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and the significant waste and fraud related to the billions of dollars expended in those countries.

I also explained that we had been issuing our lead-IG quarterly reports for several years and that the IG Act specifically required that these reports be made public. I noted that we gathered most of the information for the reports from government agencies and that we vetted all information in the public reports with the agencies themselves, including the Defense Department, to ensure that nothing was classified or too sensitive for public release.

I then said that unless and until the Inspector General Act was changed, I was going to follow the law and continue issuing these reports publicly. No one challenged my comments. The participants were puzzled by President Trump’s statements and uncertain how to respond. After discussion about which reports—mine, those of the special IG for Afghanistan reconstruction, or both—had raised the president’s ire, the meeting ended.

Over the next year, as required by the Inspector General Act, we still released public reports about the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. In several of our reports, we continued to question the optimistic assessments from government officials about the progress of these wars.

Then in March 2020 the pandemic hit, shutting down much of the economy. Congress quickly enacted the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which provided more than $2 trillion in emergency relief funding. The legislation also created a committee of federal IGs, called the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, to coordinate oversight of these expenditures and to investigate and report on misuse and fraud related to the funds. The CARES Act required that one IG with experience managing the oversight of large organizations be appointed as the committee chair. President Trump had criticized the oversight required by the CARES Act, announcing, “I’ll be the oversight.”

Michael Horowitz, the head of the coordinating organization for federal inspectors general, was responsible for selecting the chair of this committee. He asked me to accept the position, in addition to serving as the acting Defense Department inspector general. I was reluctant. Managing the Defense IG’s office was difficult enough without the added responsibility of building and coordinating a committee of IGs overseeing trillions of dollars in funding. Horowitz persisted, and in the end, I agreed to take the position.

My appointment was announced on March 30, 2020. Within a week, that appointment, as well as my four-and-a-half-year tenure as the acting Defense IG, came to a sudden end. President Trump nominated someone else to become the permanent Defense IG, and he appointed the IG from the Environmental Protection Agency to replace me immediately as the acting Defense IG (while that person simultaneously retained his EPA role).

This IG, Sean O’Donnell, had only recently been nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate for the EPA position. My removal as the acting Defense IG also meant that I could no longer chair the pandemic accountability committee.

The president did not violate any law by replacing me; a president has the legal authority to change inspectors general. But it is unusual for a president to replace an acting IG while a nomination for the permanent role is pending. It also is uncommon for anyone to lead two IG offices at the same time, for good reason. Leading one IG office is hard enough; for a single IG to effectively manage two is nearly impossible—particularly when one is as big as the Defense IG’s office, which is the largest of the 74 federal IG offices. The Defense IG’s office has more than 1,700 employees in 50 offices worldwide. It oversees the entire Defense Department, an organization with more than 3 million people and an annual budget exceeding $700 billion.

No one from the White House or the Defense Department contacted me to officially notify me that I was being replaced or to tell me why. I learned about it on April 6, 2020, when I was leading a conference call of IGs organizing the work of the pandemic accountability committee. Horowitz asked me to stay on the line at the end of the call. After everyone else hung up, he informed me that he had just heard that I had been replaced as the acting Defense IG, which meant that I was no longer on the committee. When I asked Horowitz if he knew why I was being replaced, he said he had not been given a reason.

After the call, I asked the Defense IG general counsel to confirm the news and to obtain formal documentation. He contacted the Defense Department general counsel, who forwarded the formal designation of my replacement, signed by President Trump in his inimitable signature. It was official.

My removal made headlines across the country. Some members of Congress and news articles maintained that President Trump had replaced me because I had developed a reputation for conducting independent and aggressive oversight, and he did not want that for the oversight of pandemic-relief funding. Paul Rosenzweig, a political appointee in the George W. Bush administration, called the removal “an affront to independence and oversight.”

I was not the only IG targeted around this time. President Trump fired, tried to replace, or denounced five IGs (including me) in a short period of time. They included Michael Atkinson, the Intelligence Community IG who had forwarded the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to Congress, and Steve Linick, the State Department IG. A Washington Post article called the IG firings “Trump’s slow-motion Friday night massacre of inspectors general.”

It was hard for me to leave my position. I loved the job, and I believed that our office was having a positive impact on the Defense Department. I was never told why I was replaced. Was it because President Trump did not want aggressive oversight of the pandemic-relief funds? Was it because I had continued to issue public reports raising questions about the progress of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, contrary to the president’s public instructions? Was it because my office was conducting sensitive investigations that affected the White House?

I still don’t know for certain. What I do know is that IGs are not the most popular people in government—in any administration. When they do their job right, they are bound to make powerful government officials, up to and including the president, unhappy.

However, inspectors general are crucial in the battle to keep government officials honest and accountable and to improve government operations. They provide independent oversight of government operations from within their agencies. They help hold government officials and agencies accountable for misconduct. They investigate contractors who defraud government programs. They return billions of dollars to the Treasury Department in financial recoveries every year. They make government programs more efficient and effective. They provide transparency on government operations, issuing reports that inform taxpayers how their dollars are being spent. They regularly testify before Congress about agency programs.

As “Federalist No. 51”  stated: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.” President Harry Truman made a similar argument in 1947 as part of his famous Truman Doctrine: “No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected.”

To be sure, IGs are not the only watchdogs pursuing government honesty and accountability. An independent judiciary, congressional oversight, the Government Accountability Office, a free press, public-interest groups, and regular elections provide vital controls on government. However, oversight by IGs is one of the key checks and balances on our government.

During my years as an inspector general, I also saw that the overwhelming majority of public servants in the government manage their challenging assignments responsibly and conscientiously, typically at low pay and with significant sacrifice. Some of them—including those in the Defense, State, and Justice Departments; the U.S. Agency for International Development; the Central Intelligence Agency; and other agencies—are deployed overseas in dangerous environments to pursue our country’s interests and keep us safe.

I also learned, through many visits from foreign officials seeking to understand the U.S. system, that our watchdogs are stronger and granted more legal authority than their counterparts in other countries, even democratic ones. A few countries have auditors general or inspectors general, but with more limited oversight. Most of them do not have the same independence, funding, and statutory authority throughout their government. In contrast, the U.S. system places an IG in every federal agency and gives them the resources, access, and authority to investigate, audit, evaluate, and report on any aspect of their agencies’ operations.

Inspectors general are one of our democracy’s strengths, and we should support, protect, and extend their oversight of government.

This essay has been adapted from Glenn Fine’s book, Watchdogs: Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government.