The federal government’s 74 inspectors general trace their lineage to the Inspector General Act of 1978, which authorized them to promote efficiency and effectiveness and to combat waste, fraud and abuse. Congress originally envisioned the inspectors general as independent and impartial overseers of federal agencies, and some have lived up to this expectation.
Others, however, have been willing to protect corrupt agency leaders, flout Congress and punish whistleblowers. The principal cause of their misbehavior is their subservience to agency leaders, which routinely trumps their responsibilities to congressional overseers.
If Congress wishes to overcome this fundamental deficiency, it must redesign the entire system.
In 2014, eight whistleblowers from the U.S. Agency for International Development notified Congress of rampant fraud within the Office of Inspector General. Acting Inspector General Michael G. Carroll, they attested, had systematically removed negative information from audits. The Washington Post reviewed 12 audits produced by Carroll’s office and found that negative information about USAID had been excised in more than 400 places.
Carroll and his lieutenants searched for ways to punish the foremost whistleblower, Robin Marcato. The damaging press coverage forced Carroll to retire before the task was complete. But his successor, Ann Calvaresi Barr, orchestrated Marcato’s termination.
During my time as a senior executive at USAID, in 2018 and 2019, Calvaresi Barr’s office came under additional criticism for, among other things, ignoring infractions by senior government officials. In the few instances when such individuals were disciplined, the punishments tended to be light. One of her office’s investigations determined that a senior federal employee repeatedly failed to disclose the identity of her husband’s company prior to participating in two evaluation boards that awarded that company contracts worth $987,000.
The perpetrator wasn’t prosecuted nor even fired. Instead, “OPIC issued the employee an official letter of reprimand in December 2019 which required remedial ethics training.” That’s right—remedial ethics training, for multiple acts of fraud that would have earned any local government official several years in jail.
The record of the Department of Defense Inspector General is similarly troubling. For many years, critics like Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and the non-partisan Project on Government Oversight have skewered the office’s leadership for ethical violations. Despite the wide circulation of a 2020 story implicating the office’s leaders in the suicide of one of its investigators, the bad actors remain.
I submitted whistleblower retaliation claims to the USAID and Department of Defense Offices in Inspector General in 2019 after USAID fired me for allegedly disclosing classified information in a book. I informed the inspector general that the allegation and termination were fraudulent and had been instigated by a former subordinate whom I had reported for a criminal conflict of interest. Both inspectors general conducted cursory investigations hardly worthy of the name, which involved no interviews or other data collection. Both exonerated their agencies.
When this travesty came to Grassley’s attention, he demanded a real investigation. Calvaresi Barr ordered a second investigation hardly better than the first, for which Grassley slammed Calvaresi Barr in a public letter.
Responsibility for policing the inspectors general belonged to the FBI until 2016, when Congress passed the Inspector General Empowerment Act. The act transferred the policing function to the inspectors general themselves, based on confidence in the goodness of the inspectors general.
Subsequent events have shown that confidence to have been unwarranted. The self-policing mechanism established by the community of inspectors, the Integrity Committee, has refused to investigate most of the accusations it has received and has dragged its feet on many of the others, fueling perceptions that the inspector general guild cares more about protecting its members than serving the public interest.
Between 2016 and 2020, the Inspectors General of the National Reconnaissance Office and National Security Agency received unwarranted payments, totaling $150,000 and $18,000 respectively. When a whistleblower reported this information to the Integrity Committee, it sat on its hands. Only after the story came to the attention of the press did one of these inspectors general agree to pay the money back.
In 2020, the Integrity Committee chose not to investigate allegations of misconduct by three senior officials in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General. In this case, unlike most others, the agency’s leadership found a way around the Integrity Committee’s intransigence, hiring a private law firm to conduct an independent investigation. The investigators concluded that the three officials, known within the office as the “Mean Girls,” had retaliated against “any employees they thought were in the way of their personal goals and agenda.” The investigation drove the Mean Girls out of the Department of Homeland Security, though one of them managed to obtain an even more senior job, as the State Department’s deputy inspector general.
The repeated failures of the inspectors general call for a drastic restructuring. Because the watchers have been so often compromised by their relationships with the agency officials they watch, the inspectors general should be detached from the agencies. Because the watchers have so often been lax in policing themselves, responsibility for watching the watchers should be entrusted to a new body, wholly independent of the inspector general community and the federal agencies it serves.
Mark Moyar, Ph.D., is the author of eight books, most recently “Masters of Corruption: How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the Trump Presidency.”