Did Trump Expose the D.C. Sham on Waste and Fraud?
by James Bovard, FFF
On January 24, President Trump fired 17 inspector generals working for a wide array of federal agencies. Trump’s action jolted Washington because most of those officials could supposedly only be removed for cause — specific misconduct or other abuses. Trump also scorned the federal law requiring giving Congress 30-days notice before terminating such officials.
Some of the inspector generals that Trump axed had done good work exposing government abuses while others had defaulted to the lap dog mode. A White House official justified the firings: “These rogue, partisan bureaucrats who have weaponized the justice system against their political enemies are no longer fit or deserve to serve in their appointed positions.” The official said the firings will “make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”
Maybe the White House wanted inspector generals who could bring bigger brooms to sweep evidence under rugs? The controversy that erupted over Trump’s firings largely ignored the long history of inspector generals either being wrongfully terminated or being worse than useless.
Politicians create facades to make citizens believe that government automatically guards against waste, fraud, and abuse. The purpose of inspector generals is to create the illusion of honest government — to make people think that oversight is going on. While inspector generals are routinely portrayed as paragons of integrity, many are appointed by the chief of the federal agency they oversee. Their jobs and budgets depend directly on the political appointees they are supposed to investigate, and they grovel accordingly.
Bush and the IGs
The George W. Bush administration throttled inspector generals who exposed too much dirt. After CIA Inspector General John Helgerson investigated whether CIA officials were guilty of torture, CIA director Michael Hayden responded by launching an investigation of the IG. Former CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz commented that Hayden’s investigation would be seen as an effort to sway the IG “to call off the dogs…. The rank and file will become aware of it, and it will undercut the inspector general’s ability to get the truth from them.”
Homeland Security Department Inspector General Clark Kent Irvin was pressured to downplay his findings of the failures of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and federal terrorist watch lists. But elbowing the IG failed to prevent the TSA from becoming a laughingstock and a public menace.
Federal agencies responsible for exposing abuses were neutered. During the Bush administration, the amount of Pentagon contracting skyrocketing thanks to Bush’s wars. At the same time, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the Pentagon’s front line watchdog against fraud and abuse, was gutted. The Government Accountability Office condemned the DCAA in 2008 for becoming a lapdog for military contractors. Auditors were threatened with retaliation if they did not rescind findings critical of contractors. Supervisors tampered with audit findings to exonerate companies. Reports revealing how contractors did shoddy work or overcharged the government were buried.
President Bush repeatedly revealed in signing statements that he viewed anti-corruption efforts as a violation of his prerogative. After Congress created an inspector general in late 2003 to look into the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Bush decreed:
The CPA IG shall refrain from initiating, carrying out, or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters, counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investigations by other administrative units of the Department of Defense related to national security, or other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security.
And since Bush acted as if any criticism of his policies undermined national security, it was not surprising that the new IG was hogtied even before he started on the job. The White House in 2007 “specifically exempted U.S. contractors in Iraq from any obligation to report waste, fraud and abuse to the U.S. government.” U.S. government contractors at home and elsewhere in the world are obliged to file such reports.
In 2008, Bush declared in a signing statement that his administration would not cooperate with a “Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan” Congress created “to investigate allegations of waste, mismanagement, and excessive force by contractors.” Regardless of how many controversies had arisen over U.S. contractors wantonly shooting innocent Iraqis, or how many scandals had erupted over billions of U.S. tax dollars vanishing in Iraq, the president ruled that no one had a right to discover what happened under his command. Preserving the prerogatives of the president was far more important than protecting American taxpayers or Iraqi civilians.
New York University professor Paul Light observed, “Over the past seven years they [the Bush Administration] have systematically worked to undermine IG authority and chill audit and investigatory range.” But “hope and change” for IGs didn’t arrive with Obama’s inauguration. In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama cosponsored the Inspectors General Act of 2008, enacted to buttress the independence of agency watchdogs. That act required the president to give Congress 30-days notice and a statement of “sufficient cause” before firing an inspector general.
Obama and the IGs
But Obama wasted no time in trampling the new law after he took his presidential oath of office. In June 2009, he fired the IG for AmeriCorps, Gerald Walpin, for refusing to back down from his criticisms of a prominent Obama supporter caught misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal subsidies. Walpin also spooked the White House because he courageously exposed how AmeriCorps had no legal justification for pouring tens of millions of dollars into the Teaching Fellows Program, one of the agency’s flagships. At the time, ABC News reported that a “source familiar with the president’s thinking” said that Obama wanted to replace Walpin with “someone who could effectively provide the kind of independent oversight that the president values.” The best way to ensure “independent oversight” is to remind all inspector generals that they will be axed if they embarrass the White House. A joint House-Senate investigation concluded that firing Walpin “undermines the Inspectors General Act.”
In the same month Walpin was fired, the administration unsuccessfully sought to obliterate the independence of the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Neil Barofsky. Some IGs who have not been fired have instead come under withering pressure. Russell George, the IG who exposed the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups, was perennially hammered by Obama’s congressional allies.
For most of Obama’s first term, his administration refused to appoint permanent inspectors generals at several of the largest federal agencies. There was no inspector general for the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s entire reign. Instead, the position was filled on an acting basis by a retired Foreign Service officer who was close friends with Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy. The lack of a real IG at State might have helped “contain the facts” regarding Benghazi and enabled Hillary to help coverup her official emails — a scandal that tormented her 2016 presidential campaign. The Obama administration announced a permanent IG only after Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas announced that he would block all State Department nominations until the IG slot was filled.
At the Homeland Security Department, the acting IG repeatedly launched preemptive strikes against facts that could undermine Obama’s credibility. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin declared that a DHS IG report watered down many of the details on a 2012 alcohol-and-prostitute rampage by Secret Service agents in Colombia “in order to avoid embarrassing the administration in an election year.” The acting IG first delayed and then jiggled the classification status of a report on Transportation Security Administration screw-ups to minimize the number of officials who saw it. Charles Edwards, the acting IG from early 2011 till late 2013, toadied to Obama appointees at every opportunity — stifling reports, deleting damning findings, and boasting of his chumminess with agency chieftains. Unfortunately, torpedoing oversight of the federal government’s largest nonmilitary department fits the administration’s template of suppressing evidence of its debacles far and wide.
In October 2014, the Washington Post revealed that the Agency for International Development (AID), the largest foreign-aid bureaucracy, was massively suppressing audit reports revealing waste, fraud, and abuse. More than 400 negative findings were deleted from a sample of 12 draft audit reports. In one case, more than 90 percent of the negative findings were expunged before the report was publicly released. Acting Inspector General Michael Carroll buried the embarrassing audit findings because he “did not want to create controversy as he awaited Senate confirmation to become the permanent inspector general,” according to some AID auditors.
The most brazen case involved hushing up $4.6 million in illegal ransom money that AID paid in March 2012 to secure the release of the son of Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Sam LaHood and 15 other Americans had been arrested after they entered Egypt illegally and engaged in prohibited political activism. At the time, a State Department official brazenly lied, denying that the payoff came from the U.S. government. This novel use of foreign-aid money might have caused an uproar if it had been revealed prior to Obama’s 2012 reelection.
This is not the first time that AID’s inspector general has been caught trying to bury a scandal. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), revealed in 2014 that AID had “covered up information” on U.S.-funded Afghan ministries’ potential links to terrorist organizations. Sopko was appalled at how the U.S. government was denying bitter realities in Afghanistan: “I was stunned when senior State Department officials on my first trip to Kabul suggested how we should write our reports. They even suggested changes to our report titles and proposed that we give them our press releases in advance so they could pre-approve them.”
Sopko set the gold standard for courageous, focused IGs that made sure that Americans learned of federal abuses. In 2016, Sopko declared that “U.S. policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption” in Afghanistan. A few weeks before President Biden was shocked by the collapse of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul, Sopko publicly declared: “We basically forced our generals, forced our military, forced our ambassadors, forced the USAID to try to show success in short timelines, which they themselves knew were never going to work.” Sopko exposed the systemic fraud that had long shielded U.S. military intervention:
Every time we went in, the U.S. military changed the goalposts and made it easier to show success, and then finally, when they couldn’t even do that, they classified the assessment tool. So they knew how bad the Afghan military was, and if you had a clearance you could find out, but the average American … wouldn’t know how bad it was, and we were paying for it.
Biden and the IGs
The primary lesson that the Biden administration took from Sopko’s candor was to never ever allow a special inspector general to oversee the $100+ billion in military and other aid sent to Ukraine. Congress repeatedly kowtowed to the White House to block proposals to create a Ukraine IG modeled after the Afghanistan IG. Biden policymakers recognized that the only thing worse than wasting billions of dollars was permitting Americans to learn how their tax dollars were torched. Biden preferred to preserve deniability — “Waste? What waste? We didn’t hear about” — in lieu of efficacy. Biden’s White House issued a statement that there was no need for a special IG on Ukraine because the Pentagon inspector general and the Government Accountability Office “are currently undertaking multiple investigations regarding every aspect of this assistance.” But Biden appointees made sure to minimize any embarrassing disclosures.
Trump and the IGs
Trump’s firing of the inspector generals looks like an ominous sign for transparency and accountability in Washington. But the feds have belly-flopped on those scores going back far into the last century. Two years ago, Sopko declared, “The U.S. government, whether it’s USAID, or DOD, or State, have horrible records on effective monitoring and evaluation.” Unfortunately, there is no reason to expect the second Trump administration to be better on those scores than were the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations.
The article was originally published in the July 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.
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