{"id":21752,"date":"2025-07-21T11:47:31","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T15:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21752"},"modified":"2025-07-21T20:59:59","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T00:59:59","slug":"did-trump-expose-the-d-c-sham-on-waste-and-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/21\/did-trump-expose-the-d-c-sham-on-waste-and-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Trump Expose the D.C. Sham on Waste and Fraud?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Did Trump Expose the D.C. Sham on Waste and Fraud?<\/h1>\n

by James Bovard, FFF<\/a><\/p>\n

On January 24, President Trump fired 17 inspector generals working for a wide array of federal agencies. Trump\u2019s action jolted Washington because most of those officials could supposedly only be removed for cause \u2014 specific misconduct or other abuses. Trump also scorned the federal law requiring giving Congress 30-days notice before terminating such officials.<\/p>\n

Politicians create facades to make citizens believe that government automatically guards against waste, fraud, and abuse.
\n[Click to Tweet]<\/a><\/p>\n

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: \u201cThese 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.\u201d The official said the firings will \u201cmake room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe the White House wanted inspector generals who could bring bigger brooms to sweep evidence under rugs? The controversy that erupted over Trump\u2019s firings largely ignored the long history of inspector generals either being wrongfully terminated or being worse than us<\/strong>eless.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bush and the IGs<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s investigation would be seen as an effort to sway the IG \u201cto call off the dogs\u2026. The rank and file will become aware of it, and it will undercut the inspector general\u2019s ability to get the truth from them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Federal agencies responsible for exposing abuses were neutered. During the Bush administration, the amount of Pentagon contracting skyrocketing thanks to Bush\u2019s wars. At the same time, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the Pentagon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

President Bush repeatedly revealed in signing statements that he viewed anti-corruption efforts as a violation of his prerogative.<\/strong> After Congress created an inspector general in late 2003 to look into the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Bush decreed:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cspecifically exempted U.S. contractors in Iraq from any obligation to report waste, fraud and abuse to the U.S. government.\u201d U.S. government contractors at home and elsewhere in the world are obliged to file such reports.<\/p>\n

In 2008, Bush declared in a signing statement that his administration would not cooperate with a \u201cCommission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan\u201d Congress created \u201cto investigate allegations of waste, mismanagement, and excessive force by contractors.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

New York University professor Paul Light observed, \u201cOver the past seven years they [the Bush Administration] have systematically worked to undermine IG authority and chill audit and investigatory range.\u201d But \u201chope and change\u201d for IGs didn\u2019t arrive with Obama\u2019s 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 \u201csufficient cause\u201d before firing an inspector general.<\/p>\n

Obama and the IGs<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s flagships.<\/strong> At the time, ABC News reported that a \u201csource familiar with the president\u2019s thinking\u201d said that Obama wanted to replace Walpin with \u201csomeone who could effectively provide the kind of independent oversight that the president values.\u201d T<\/strong>he best way to ensure \u201cindependent oversight\u201d 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 \u201cundermines the Inspectors General Act.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups, was perennially hammered by Obama\u2019s congressional allies.<\/p>\n

For most of Obama\u2019s 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\u2019s entire reign.<\/strong> 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 \u201ccontain the facts\u201d regarding Benghazi and enabled Hillary to help coverup her official emails \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

At the Homeland Security Department, the acting IG repeatedly launched preemptive strikes against facts that could undermine Obama\u2019s credibility.<\/strong> 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 \u201cin order to avoid embarrassing the administration in an election year.\u201d 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 \u2014 stifling reports, deleting damning findings, and boasting of his chumminess with agency chieftains. Unfortunately, torpedoing oversight of the federal government\u2019s largest nonmilitary department fits the administration\u2019s template of suppressing evidence of its debacles far and wide.<\/p>\n

In October 2014, the Washington Post<\/em> 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 \u201cdid not want to create controversy as he awaited Senate confirmation to become the permanent inspector general,\u201d according to some AID auditors.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 2012 reelection.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time that AID\u2019s 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 \u201ccovered up information\u201d on U.S.-funded Afghan ministries\u2019 potential links to terrorist organizations. Sopko was appalled at how the U.S. government was denying bitter realities in Afghanistan: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sopko set the gold standard for courageous, focused IGs that made sure that Americans learned of federal abuses. In 2016, Sopko declared that \u201cU.S. policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption\u201d in Afghanistan. A few weeks before President Biden was shocked by the collapse of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul, Sopko publicly declared: \u201cWe 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.\u201d Sopko exposed the systemic fraud that had long shielded U.S. military intervention:<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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 \u2026 wouldn\u2019t know how bad it was, and we were paying for it.<\/p>\n

Biden and the IGs<\/strong><\/p>\n

The primary lesson that the Biden administration took from Sopko\u2019s 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.<\/strong> Biden preferred to preserve deniability \u2014 \u201cWaste? What waste? We didn\u2019t hear about\u201d \u2014 in lieu of efficacy. Biden\u2019s 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 \u201care currently undertaking multiple investigations regarding every aspect of this assistance.\u201d But Biden appointees made sure to minimize any embarrassing disclosures.<\/p>\n

Trump and the IGs<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 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, \u201cThe U.S. government, whether it\u2019s USAID, or DOD, or State, have horrible records on effective monitoring and evaluation.\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The article was originally published in the July 2025 issue of Future of Freedom<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
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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\u2019s action jolted Washington because most of those officials could supposedly only be removed for cause \u2014 specific misconduct or other abuses. 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Sham on Waste and Fraud?"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/","name":"James Bovard","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/79550830ad81c14be529a2c37469974f","name":"Jim","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","caption":"Jim"},"description":"Bovard's homepage is at http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com He can be contacted at jim@jimbovard.com James Bovard is the author of ten books. The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21752"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21793,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21752\/revisions\/21793"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}