President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s offensive against federal waste, fraud, and abuse has exposed the antics of agencies whose acronyms had previously been known to few people, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, with its slew of transgender and diversity programs, and the National Institutes of Health, funder of sex changes for mice, rats, and monkeys.
Less salacious but ultimately more momentous are the changes the new administration is pursuing against another set of acronyms, the IGs, or inspectors general — the officials at the forefront of combating waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump’s firing of 17 IGs during his first week in office was a crucial first step in restoring integrity and accountability. But in that vein, two more acronyms have yet to be fully addressed — CIGIE and its IC.
CIGIE stands for Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. The federal inspectors general elect the council’s leadership, provide its funding, attend its conferences, and congratulate themselves for receiving its awards. The CIGIE chair appoints the members of the Integrity Committee, which investigates allegations of wrongdoing by inspectors general.
In other words, the top federal officials responsible for combating waste, fraud, and abuse get to pick a member of their club to oversee the club to oversee themselves. Hence CIGIE is reluctant to call out other club members for bad behavior, for as in most any other club, the members of the inspector general club want to get along with one another, and they want to maintain the prestige of the club. Like the country clubber who learns that the brother of the golf committee chairman received an exorbitant landscaping contract, the inspector general who hears of corruption involving another inspector general has to consider that raising a fuss might poison the congenial atmosphere, create enemies, and tarnish the club’s reputation.
The CIGIE Integrity Committee has a long history of blowing off allegations of inspector general misconduct. Sometimes it claims it lacks authority or resources. Sometimes it quickly exonerates the accused without explanation. Ryan Sweazey, whose foundation advocates hundreds of military whistleblowers neglected by inspectors general, has concluded that by routinely absolving the inspectors general, CIGIE had made clear that its “true mission is not overseeing IGs, it’s protecting them.”
When, on occasion, the Integrity Committee receives a complaint too outrageous to toss aside, it acts at a snail’s pace. Evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse sufficient to oust a corporate leader in a matter of days will take a matter of years for the IC to consider.
In April 2017, several U.S. senators sent the CIGIE Integrity Committee whistleblower reports of waste, fraud, and abuse in the office of Laura Wertheimer, inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The Integrity Committee took almost one year to launch an investigation. The investigation then took another three years. During these four years, Wertheimer was alleged to have continued to abuse her powers. In one instance, she retaliated against an honest employee for meeting with congressional staff by nicknaming him “weasel” and distributing copies of a children’s book titled Weasels to members of her staff. When Congress finally received the investigation’s results, Wertheimer retired, evading punishment.
Members of Congress have recently begun to recognize that their legislation has given CIGIE too much power and too little oversight. At a House hearing in July 2024, frustrated representatives from both parties skewered Mark Lee Greenblatt, then the head of CIGIE, for the Integrity Committee’s disinterest in inspector general misconduct. Not even members of Congress, they noted, could get the IC to explain its decisions to turn down cases. Greenblatt protested lamely that the IC could be entrusted with so much power and so little accountability because it contained people he really trusted.
Hannibal “Mike” Ware became chairman of CIGIE shortly before Trump began his second term. When Trump fired him along with 16 other inspectors general, Ware responded publicly that CIGIE did “not believe that the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed inspectors general.” He was removed from his office nonetheless, and the CIGIE website’s leadership page states that the CIGIE chair is vacant.
Ware, however, isn’t going down easily. On Feb. 12, he and seven other inspectors general sued the government to get their jobs back. Shockingly, another part of the CIGIE website still lists Ware as its chairman. The White House and DOGE evidently have yet to tame the CIGIE bureaucrats.
The Trump administration is not awaiting the results of the lawsuit to replace the ousted inspectors general. On the CIGIE website can be found a button labeled “Interested in Becoming an Inspector General?” Upon clicking the button, one learns that 32 inspector general positions are vacant.
In the near term, government accountability will continue to depend on the character of individual inspectors general. It is therefore crucial that Trump nominate people committed to the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse.
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In the longer term, Congress will have to find a solution less dependent on the merits of individual inspectors general. While the virtuous individual should always be society’s preferred product, experience has shown that virtue in government officials cannot be guaranteed.
Congress needs to revamp the entire inspector general system so that the inspectors general are separated from the agencies they oversee and are policed by an agency independent of the inspectors general. When the luster of the current crusade against waste, fraud, and abuse has faded, the nation’s watchdog system will need a system of checks and balances as effective as the one the Founding Fathers instituted in the early republic.
Mark Moyar is the William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College and is the author of Masters of Corruption: How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the Trump Presidency.