Tag Archives: POGO

Inspectors General 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 be found on Oversight.gov as well as the non-governmental website Oversight.garden (there is some duplication between the sites, but the garden also posts some unreleased IG reports). Though IG reports fall within the scope of the FDLP, many of these reports have historically fallen through the cracks — they’re a goldmine of fugitive documents for anyone interested in reporting them to GPO to collect and catalog, but that’s a whole other story.

While these offices normally conduct independent audits and investigations and make recommendations to fix waste, fraud and abuse well below the radar of the public, lately they’ve been in the news as the Trump Administration has fired or sidelined several IGs for highly political reasons — notably including the Intelligence Community IG, the State Department IG, the Acting Transportation Department IG, the Acting Health and Human Services IG, and the Acting Pentagon IG who was chosen to serve as the head of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee created by Congress on March 27, 2020.

The administration’s actions has brought Congress — historically very supportive of IGs — to a boiling point, with a new bill introduced H.R. 6668: Inspectors General Independence Act of 2020 to “amend the Inspector General Act of 1978 to require removal for cause of Inspectors General, and for other purposes.” This is surely an issue which every depository librarian will want to keep an eye on.

To learn more about these little known but important internal watchdogs embedded in many executive agencies, check out this report by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) entitled “THE WATCHDOGS AFTER FORTY YEARS: Recommendations for Our Nation’s Federal Inspectors General” (published July 9, 2018). POGO also more recently produced the really informative youtube video below.

HT to FirstBranchForecast! Everyone should subscribe to this amazing newsletter.