The federal government shutdown is now into its 3rd week with no end in sight. One of the overlooked parts of this shutdown is that the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) has gone dark as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has withheld funds from the Inspector General committee. At least 28 Offices of the Inspector General (OIGs) have gone dark as well. This is only the latest attack on government oversight from this administration, which fired 17 Inspectors General in the first week after being sworn in.
Several government oversight websites went down — and with them, access to watchdog reports and required hotline and whistleblower links — as of Wednesday morning as the White House Office of Management and Budget has moved to withhold funds from the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, or CIGIE.
“Due to a lack of apportionment of funds, this website is currently unavailable,” the CIGIE website states.
The Office of Inspector General websites for the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Justice, Interior and Veterans Affairs show the same line, as well as the OIG website for the Environmental Protection Agency, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Office of Personnel Management. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s website is also down.
Inspectors General (IGs) are a little known unit within many federal agencies. They were set up in the 1970s to “identify waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government.” Their reports can *usually* be found on Oversight.gov and ignet.gov – as well as on agency IG sites. But those urls are currently 404 “page not found”!
Well now the Democratic representatives on the House Judiciary Committee have launched their own watchdog website amid withheld funding from CIGIE. This new OIG Website Repository is meant to be a “centralized online repository of resources for whistleblowers as the websites of many government watchdogs remain dark because of the White House budget office withholding funding from a central inspector general group.”
The site doesn’t list ALL agency Inspector Generals (IGs), but it is an effort to maintain access to IG sites and list IG whistleblower hotlines so that federal employees will be able to continue to report “waste, fraud, and corruption.”
The Democrats of the House Committee on the Judiciary have put together this page to serve as a resource to support Inspectors General’s important work exposing waste, fraud, and corruption, ensure the American public’s access to reports and findings, and protect whistleblowers’’ ability to contact OIGs to report misconduct. We will continue updating this website until all OIG websites are fully restored.
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