TRUMP’S WAR ON TRUTH TELLERS

By James Bovard

Some folks who know my work presume that I am implacably opposed to all federal agencies. Not true.  I have always appreciated federal agencies who exposed the waste, fraud, abuse, and brazen lies committed by politicians and bureaucrats.

The Trump administration has warred against such truth tellers since its first week in office. 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 those inspectors had done excellent work.

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.”

But does the Trump version of “rule of law” go beyond hiding all government crimes?

Among the initial firings was John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Sopko was one of the most heroic truth tellers in modern Washington. He withstood fierce pressure from multiple presidents to debunk official propaganda on the Afghanistan war:

In 2014, Sopko revealed: “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.”

In 2019, Sopko declared that “the American people have constantly been lied to” about the Afghan war.

In 2020, Sopko testified to Congress: “There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue . . . mendacity and hubris. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie.”

A few weeks after Trump fired him, Sopko declared: “The problem was, we have built into the American system to lie to the American people.”

Trump later fired other inspector generals and acting inspector generals, bringing the toll to roughly two dozen. The New York Times, in a piece headlined, “Watchdogs Are Watching Their Backs,” noted: “The message to thousands of workers in inspectors general offices was clear: Be careful what you choose to investigate or you might be out of a job.”

Late last month, the Trump administration deleted funding for the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.  That torpedoed dozens of websites with bevies of reports of federal abuses, including “a repository of decades of recommendations on how the government can save money,” the New York Times reported.  It also knocked offline the “hotline and whistle-blower links for the public to provide allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse.” Armen Tooloee, an Office of Management and Budget spokesman, justified the demolition by claiming that inspector generals “have become corrupt, partisan, and in some cases, have lied to the public. The American people will no longer be funding this corruption.”

And since inspector generals have been fired, there is no risk of other corruption in Washington.

Trump is repeating the same anti-oversight jihad that the George W. Bush administration launched earlier this century. President Bush repeatedly revealed in signing statements that anti-corruption efforts violated 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.”

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.  Taxpayers had no right to know how Bush spent their paychecks.

The only lesson that the Trump team took from those Bush cover-ups is to get bigger brooms to sweep away evidence and to make more threats against potential whistleblowers.

Trump is governing as if he is entitled to sovereign immunity from reality. Trump is also warring with the Government Accountability Office. Russell Vought, the chief of the Office of Management and Budget, said last month that GAO is “something that shouldn’t exist.” GAO is Congress’s audit and investigative arm. Torpedoing GAO would be consistent with the Trump dogma that no one has a right to know how the administration is using its power or spending tax dollars.

Until 2004, GAO was known as the Government Accounting Office – almost the personification of innocuousness.  When I was getting rolling as an investigative journalist in Washington in the 1980s, GAO quickly became one of my favorite sources. A long, widely-hated article I did in 1983 on the failure of federal food assistance relied on GAO reports on the failure of school lunches and food stamps to improve nutrition or bolster good health. When I pummeled federal farm programs in the 1980s, GAO reports were often linchpins for my attacks.  When GAO issued reports exposing agricultural program failures, congressional staff would summon them to Capitol Hill and berate them for hours without mercy.  But the auditors usually stuck to their guns.

GAO is no Temple of Delphi entitled to automatic deference.  The agency has sometimes taken a dive on controversial issues or bungled its analyses beyond repair.  But American citizens have few alternatives for semi-credible information inside the government.  Crippling GAO won’t make any boondoggles vanish.

Trump’s vendetta against auditors and inspectors will do nothing to make Washington less devious and deceitful.  “Truth will out” is still the biggest fairy tale in Washington. And there is no reason to expect Trump or any of his appointees to sacrifice themselves in the name of full disclosure.

Even if federal inspectors and auditors often kowtow or strike out,  their existence provides a riverboat gamble that citizens could someday learn of official outrages.  Many federal agencies suffer the same ‘incentive to require people to lie’ that SIGAR John Sopko mentioned on for Afghan policy.  And we can’t count on divine intervention to compel  Washington policymakers to  deal honestly with the American people.