The U.S. Constitutional Council would take over and have the authority over the Office of Inspectors General and would manage the designation, hiring, and installation of all Inspectors General and oversee management of all Inspectors General Offices throughout the entire Federal government and thereby monitor all of the government’s activities.
When an issue comes to the attention of an Inspector General and the matter cannot be resolved according the protocols usually employed by the Inspector General, then:
1) The Inspector General would notify the Council, and there would be a discussion between him and the official in charge of the area where the issue was discovered in front of the one or more Councilors concerning what the problem is and what measures need to be taken to correct the problem, along with whatever measures of remediation are deemed appropriate.
2) If the first step does not bring the matter to a satisfactory conclusion, the Council should provide a warning to the responsible official of what actions the Council is contemplating if compliance remains unsatisfactory and/or unresolved.
3) Considering that this is a government of the people, the US Constitutional Council has the final word.
Remarks
Heretofore, all Inspectors General have been appointed either by the President [in most cases] or sometimes by Congress. In either case, there is abundant evidence that political considerations have had a deleterious effect on the work of the Inspectors General and their offices, which is contrary to the role of the auditing that the Inspectors General need to do.
The Constitutional Council and the Executive Branch: Inspectors Generals and their offices
Cases: Americorp | Amtrak | NASA | SEC | NSA
In general and in theory each Office of Inspectors General conducts independent investigations, audits, inspections, and special reviews of personnel and programs to detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct, and to promote integrity, economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in the particular area of the US government to which a given Office of Inspectors General is assigned. There are currently 73 Offices of Inspectors General, each charged with overseeing a specific part of the government. Currently Inspectors General overseeing Government offices, departments, bureaus and agencies of the Executive Branch are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Inspectors General who are overseeing entities not under direct Presidential management such as Government corporations and commissions, e.g., the FCC and the Postal Service, are designated by those entities.
While the concept of Inspectors General is definitely a constructive measure against governmental corruption and waste, it is presently flawed by the fact that Inspectors General are not only appointed by, but also can be terminate by, the President or the entity that the Inspector General is overseeing according how he was appointed in the first place. In other words, each Inspector General is dependent upon the President or entity that he is overseeing not only for getting his job but also for keeping his job.
The Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency is an independent entity and not part of the executive branch; however, essentially all parts of the executive branch are overseen by Inspectors General who are appointed by the President. The Inspector General Reform Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-409 [H.R. 928], which Senator Obama co-sponsored and President Bush signed into law on Oct. 14, 2008) states: "If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress, not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.” This clause was very deliberately incorporated in the Inspector General Reform Act to safeguard the various Offices of Inspectors General from being tampered with or influenced by the President or by the bureaucracies that the Inspectors General are tasked to oversee. It is not working very well.
These Offices of Inspectors General are not supposed to be tainted by politics; however, almost all of the Offices of Inspectors General trace their authority to politically elected or selected officials. And there certainly have been instances where they have been more than just tainted. For example, President Obama in June 2009 improperly fired the Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service Gerald Walpin; and almost simultaneously Inspector General of Amtrak Fred Weiderhold was mysteriously forced to retire.In CNCS Inspector General Gerald Walpin’s case he blew the whistle in 2008 on former NBA basketball star, Sacramento mayor, and active Obama supporter Kevin Johnson for misappropriating $850,000 that AmeriCorp had granted to St. Hope Academy. AmeriCorps is an initiative of the Corporation for National and Community Service [CNCS]; and St. Hope Academy is a Sacramento-based school founded by Kevin Johnson.
May 20, 2009 there was a contentious meeting in which Mr. Walpin chastised the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service for failing to exercise oversight over AmeriCorps grants. A couple weeks later on June 4 Walpin released two reports highly critical of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which he was charged to oversee. One of the reports dealt with the agency's handling of a case involving suspicions of misuse of federal grant money by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.
On Thursday evening June 11, Mr. Obama fired Gerald Walpin, Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service. He offered no public reason for doing so other than that he "no longer" had "the fullest confidence" in Mr. Walpin (as if he knew Walpin at all). (However, two days earlier, according to White House visitor logs, Alan Solomont, CNCS's former board chairman (and Obama nominee for Ambassador to Spain), had a meeting with Michelle Obama's then-chief of staff, Jackie Norris, who had just been slated for a high position at the CNCS.
Mr. Walpin had "absolutely" no doubt that his firing was retaliation for his sharp criticism of the Corporation for National and Community Service and for clashes with its Obama-appointed chairman, Alan Solomont, a Democrat closely allied with the Obama Administration.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, questioned the firing and the explanation for it, saying that "There have been no negative findings against Mr. Walpin by the Integrity Committee of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, and [Mr. Walpin] has identified millions of dollars in Americorps funds either wasted outright or spent in violation of established guidelines.Amtrak
The case of Inspector General Fred Weiderhold, though different in the details, was not much different in its general nature. Weiderhold was the Amtrak Inspector General for a long time and had a commendable record for exposing waste, fraud, and abuse. However, when he submitted a report, independently confirmed by a former Federal prosecutor, charging that Amtrak’s managers had interfered with the oversight of the railroad’s $1.3 Billion piece of Obama’s Stimulus package, Amtrak’s management forced Fred Weiderholder to retire essentially on the spot. The details are not part of the public record despite that Sen. Grassley protested the highly questionable circumstances and illegal procedures of Weiderhold’s firing.
Besides their highly suspicious circumstances, the abrupt dismissals of both Walpin and Weiderhold were improper because they were effected without the 30 day notice to Congress required by law. However, there was no scandal because a) both Houses of Congress were firmly in the hands of the Democratic party, which was not about to raise any fuss that would sully their recently elected Democratic President; and b) quite possible for the same reason, the legacy media barely reported these incidents and did not in the slightest follow up or put any pressure of publicity on the government concerning the obvious irregularities of these cases.NASA
The cases of Walpin and Weiderhold portray what can happen to Inspectors General who are honest and conscientious about watching out for waste, inefficiency and fraud. The more frequent problem concerns Inspectors General who are compromised and fail to vigorously pursue waste, inefficiency and fraud and worse. One such person was Robert Cobb, the Inspector General for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; he maintained a cozy social relationship with top NASA management and soft-pedaled investigations. His subordinates accused him of berating them in vile language and driving away talented professionals. Some also claimed that he delayed or watered down reports … and retaliated against whistle-blowers. However, top politically appointed management at NASA unsurprisingly felt that he was doing his job quite satisfactorily.+++++++
More recently in his first week in office President Trump fired 17 Inspectors General, who had long histories of whitewashing reports and playing politics. [1]SEC
Indeed retaliation can be a nasty problem for honest people trying to rid our government of corruption. SEC attorney and whistleblower Darcy Flynn has stated that contacting the SEC’s Inspector General is considered "the nuclear option" – a move "well-known to be a career-killer."
Back in 2005, when former SEC whistle-blower Gary Aguirre, who has served as Flynn's attorney, “tried [as an SEC investigator] to pursue an insider-trading case against Pequot Capital that involved John Mack, the future CEO of Morgan Stanley, he [Aguirre] was fired by phone while on vacation. Two Senate committees later determined that Aguirre, who has since opened a private practice representing whistle-blowers, was dismissed improperly as part of a ‘process of reprisal’ by the SEC. Two SEC whistle-blowers in the Allen Stanford case (involving a Ponzi scheme, fraud and multiple violations of U.S. securities laws for alleged "massive ongoing fraud" involving $7 billion)[Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Stanford#Ponzi_scheme_and_fraud_convictions ], Julie Preuitt and Joel Sauer, also experienced retaliation – including reprimands and demotions – after raising concerns about superficial investigations. ‘There's no mechanism to raise these issues at the SEC,’ says another former SEC whistle-blower.” In other words the SEC Office of Inspector General is not working the way it should, but is allowing retaliation against whistleblowers.
“As a federally protected whistle-blower, Flynn is not permitted to speak to the press. But in evidence he presented to the SEC's inspector general and three congressional committees [in the summer of 2011], the 13-year veteran of the agency paints a startling picture of a federal police force that has effectively been conquered by the financial criminals it is charged with investigating. In at least one case, according to Flynn, investigators at the SEC found their desire to bring a case against an influential bank thwarted by senior officials in the enforcement division – whose director turned around and accepted a lucrative job from the very same bank they had been prevented from investigating. In another case, the agency farmed out its inquiry to a private law firm – one hired by the company under investigation. The outside firm, unsurprisingly, concluded that no further investigation of its client was necessary. To complete the bureaucratic laundering process, Flynn says, the SEC dropped the case and destroyed the files.”
Probably Flynn’s scalp was saved from retribution because he alerted the National Archives and Records Administration – quite separate from the SEC and its Inspector General – that SEC records that they were supposedly preserving were being systematically destroyed by the SEC. When that cat was out of the bag there was nothing that the SEC and its Inspector General could do to cover it up, and retaliating against Flynn would have inflamed the situation.
The salient aspect of Flynn’s charge is that since 1993 the SEC was illegally destroying all evidence and all supporting investigative information of every case for which the SEC received a tip of possible wrongdoing but which did not make it through all the wickets involved to be escalated into a full blown investigation. Basically that means that the SEC deliberately destroyed the records of many thousands of cases. For a peek at the information that the SEC shoved down the memory hole consider:
PARTY
MUI #
OPENED/CLOSED
ISSUE
Goldman Sachs
MLA-01909
6/99 - 4/00
Market Manipulation
Deutsche Bank
MHO-09356
11/01 - 7/02
Insider Trading
Deutsche Bank
MHO-09432
2/02 - 8/02
Market Manipulation
Lehman Brothers
MNY-07013
3/02 - 7/02
Financial Fraud
Goldman Sachs
MNY-08198
11/09 - 12/09
Insider Trading
(MUI is shorthand for “Matter Under Inquiry.” Cryptic information like this is all that remains of thousands of SEC cases.)
“Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did … a 2005 case of insider trading at … soon-to-be-bankrupt [Lehman Brothers] … as well as … records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.”
These are just the top snowflakes of a vast submerged iceberg of criminal activity. Lord only knows how times the SEC destroyed the records of dismissed indications of faulty situations that eventually resulted in the financial collapse of 2008-09. One thing is clear: the SEC is not working the way it should, and neither is its Inspector General.NSA
Another instance of retaliation was revealed in some of the details that pertain to what might be called the “Trailblazer affair”. This case is a long and complicated matter which is described in a lengthy report titled “The Secret Sharer”, by Jane Mayer in the May 23, 2011, issue of the New Yorker. Essentially all of the information and much of the wording recounted herein about this matter come from Jane Mayer’s account and from Wikipedia’s discussion of “Trailblazer”, which has been similarly reported by others.
Without recreating the whole account, which would require an extensive excursion from the matter at hand, what are discussed here are the relevant aspects of that report that have bearing upon the rationale for the Constitutional Council.
In particular in September, 2002, Bill Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, and Diane S Roark, all of whom were very much involved in, or knowledgeable about, the affairs of the NSA, filed what they thought was a confidential complaint with the Pentagon’s Inspector General. The general nature of the complaint was to expose the reckless expense, and the comprehensive illegal intrusion upon the private communications of Americans, by the Trailblazer program, which NSA was attempting to build, and which could have been handled much more efficiently, inexpensively, and legally by the already working ThinThread Program, which NSA decided to abandon.
Well before the confidential IG complaint was filed, in the early days of the Trailblazer project several NSA employees, including Bimney and Wiebe, met with Diane Roark, who was an NSA budget expert on the House Intelligence Committee. They aired their grievances about Trailblazer. In response, NSA director Michael Hayden sent out a memo saying that “individuals, in a session with our congressional overseers, took a position in direct opposition to one that we had corporately decided to follow ... Actions contrary to our decisions will have a serious adverse effect on our efforts to transform N.S.A., and I cannot tolerate them."
In December, 2005, the N.S.A.’s culture of secrecy was breached by a stunning leak. The Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that the N.S.A. was running a warrantless wiretapping program inside the United States.
Shortly thereafter President George W. Bush ordered the FBI to find whoever had disclosed information about the NSA electronic surveillance program and its disclosure in the New York Times. Eventually, this investigation led to the people who had filed the 2002 DoD IG request, even though they had nothing to do with the New York Times disclosure.
On July 26, 2007, at 9AM Eastern Standard Time, the houses of Roark, Binney, and Wiebe were simultaneously raided by armed FBI agents. According to accounts Binney claims the FBI pointed guns at his head and that of his wife.
Roark, who always considered herself “a law-and-order person,” said of the raid, “This changed my faith.” She says, “I didn’t think the system was perfect, but I thought they’d play fair with me. They didn’t. I felt it was retribution.”
Wiebe, a retired NSA analyst, was the most surprised by the raid—he had not yet been contacted in connection with the investigation. He recalls that agents locked his two Pembroke Welsh corgis in a bathroom and commanded his daughter and his mother-in-law, who was in her bathrobe, to stay on a couch while they searched his house. He says, “I feel I’m living in the very country I worked for years to defeat: the Soviet Union. We’re turning into a police state.” Like Roark, he says of the raid, “It was retribution for our filing the Inspector General complaint.”
They are confident that the raids were retribution for involvement with the confidential complaint with the Pentagon’s Inspector General. That was the only significant thing they had in common.
None of these people were ever charged with any crime. For reasons unknown Loomis escaped harassment.
The following conclusions can be drawn from these cases:
In the last case the presumption of innocence was thrown to the wind, and the FBI was used to violate people’s Constitutional rights and human rights. If there were some pretext for assuming that the people that the FBI raided were armed and dangerous, there might be some excuse for the FBI’s behavior. There was no such pretext. This is just another example of the police state our once great republic is descending into.
The Whistle-blower Protection law is a dead letter when it gets in the way of sufficiently powerful people and their ambitions, regardless of the supposed nature of a confidential complaint to an Inspector General.
The whole reason for the Inspector General system is to expunge corruption from within our government; however, retaliation against whistleblowers corrupts the Inspector General system itself and hobbles its effectiveness.
If the Inspector General system had worked the way it is supposed to work in the first place, Jane Mayer’s article would presumably never have been written, and the dreadful Edward Snowden affair – he took his inspiration from her article – would never have occurred; the essential aspects of the US Constitution would not have been violated; the NSA would have been able to go about its business of protecting the country without its damning exposure; and we might not have lost so much ground in the War against Terrorism, which is the raison d’être for the NSA.
In conclusion the Inspector General system is not working the way it is supposed to work, and it never fully will so long as it is under political influence. In order for Inspectors General to be able to perform their work properly they must be able to do so without political interference and without being vulnerable to retribution. And in order for the public to have confidence that Inspectors General are doing their work without political interference, they must avoid the appearance of being vulnerable to political interference.
Accordingly, the Constitutional Council Amendment provides that the Constitutional Council take control of all Offices of Inspectors General and control over the role of appointing all Inspectors General; all Inspectors General must report to the Constitutional Council. Inspectors General shall be appointed for a 5 year (cf. similar discussion below for high DOJ offices) term which is renewable once. A termed out Inspector General may be considered for an entirely different and unrelated post, but not for a post related in any way to a post where he has already served.1 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-fires-least-12-independent-inspectors-general-washington-post-reports-2025-01-25/
