Good riddance to the inspectors general

President Trump’s attack on federal oversight continues. In September, the administration temporarily defunded the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), an umbrella group for inspectors general. In October, Trump fired Parisa Salehi, the Senate-confirmed inspector general of the Export-Import Bank.  

Backlash was swift. A dramatic report from CBS News warned that cutting the council’s funding would “mean a further hollowing out” of government oversight. MSNBC went further, declaring, “the system of inspectors general is now effectively broken.”  

If true, that might be a good thing. I am sympathetic to those who believe that inspectors general are vital: I worked for one of the inspectors general fired by Trump. But I am also sickened to see so many people offer defense to an oversight regime that, in its current form, has done little to earn it. The inspector general system was broken long before Trump supposedly tore it apart. It is long past time for reform. 

Few seem to remember now, but there was a moment when some experts were actually calling for less oversight, not more. That was because the existing system was both too cumbersome and too fixated on assessing programs against metrics that ultimately didn’t matter.  

They had a point. Most inspector general products miss the bigger picture, analyzing minutia instead of strategic outcomes. The result? Rather than focusing on self-evident structural problems, inspectors general obsess over flaws in individual programs that, on their own, are mostly irrelevant.

I invite anyone to actually read a random performance audit or evaluation report from any inspector general. Inevitably, you will find it either states the obvious in mealy-mouthed ways or qualifies and equivocates to the point of saying nothing.  

A recent example: It is common knowledge that U.S. military assistance has helped Ukraine fend off a superior Russian enemy. So do we really need auditors to tell us that the departments of Defense and State “generally administered and managed [foreign military financing] funds for the 4 Ukraine [foreign military financing] cases we reviewed, valued at $243 million, from a total of 11 cases, valued at $282 million, in accordance with established processes?”

Please. 

In addition to absurdly bad writing, findings like this underscore the blinkered focus of inspectors general. The end goal of providing arms to Ukraine is not to follow a process but to help Ukraine win a war. If that goal is achieved, it will render U.S. security assistance to Ukraine unambiguously successful — even if “established processes” were not followed.

According to the most recent annual report of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, taxpayers fork over at least $3.9 billion per year for insipid findings like this. That’s in the ballpark of what it took each year to fund Afghan security forces against a determined Taliban insurgency.  

The council claims an 18-fold return on the cost to fund inspectors general. But this calculation is sleight of hand, based on purported “monetary accomplishments,” which includes significant potential savings that may never be realized.  

More specifically, the preponderance of the supposed “return” consists of “questioned” costs that are not necessarily recovered at all, and funds that could be “put to better use” — that is, monies that theoretically could be spent more efficiently but which aren’t necessarily recovered or repurposed to better effect.

To underscore the distinction between actual and potential monetary recoveries: the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction questioned more than $541 million in agency costs. Only 6.4 percent of that amount — about $35 million — was subsequently disallowed. 

The upshot? It is entirely unclear how valuable inspectors general actually are. In May of this year, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency for documents substantiating the purported “monetary accomplishments” of inspectors general. The council delayed the request for months and has not provided any such documents.

The much greater problem, however, is the flawed premise of this oversight, that U.S. programs will succeed if they simply adhere to laws, regulations and agency procedures. Good compliance might be important, but it doesn’t offset bad public policy. On the contrary, it can cloak bad policy in a smokescreen of respectability.

Perhaps that is why the federal government routinely runs massive fiscal deficits despite “economy and efficiency” being a key statutory purpose of inspectors general.

To save itself in the long run, the oversight community must drop its obsession with process over outcomes. It must also do much more to account for and scrutinize the bigger picture. Individual programs may be important, but they only really matter if they aggregate to strategic effects. Finally, inspectors general must be much more honest about how much money they really save.

If inspectors general prove incapable of taking these simple steps to make their work more impactful and prove their indispensability, we should all applaud their demise.

Dan Fisher is the former deputy director of the Lessons Learned Program at the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. He served in Afghanistan as an infantry officer.