Restoring Independence to Government Watchdogs

Inspectors general — the nonpolitical, nonpartisan officials who oversee federal agencies to catch and prevent fraud, waste, and other wrongdoing — are in the midst of a crisis. Under the current administration, politicized appointments, budget cuts, and diminished job protections have undermined their independence and effectiveness, increasing the risk that government mismanagement and corruption will go undetected. The crisis this community faces presents an opportunity to fix a system that has too often failed to work as an independent oversight mechanism. To restore the system of inspectors general, Congress must strengthen oversight and reinvigorate independent governance standards to increase accountability. Moreover, civil society groups must heighten public awareness of the value of inspectors general and the risks they face.

Since Watergate, Congress has created 74 inspector general offices in major departments and agencies across the federal government. Roughly half are led by inspectors general appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and half by officials appointed by agency heads. These government watchdogs are responsible for auditing agency spending, investigating allegations of crimes, corruption, and other misconduct, and regularly reporting to Congress on their findings and recommendations for improving government operations. The goal is to promote accountability and transparency.

Inspectors general require independence to do their jobs effectively; in fact, that is the whole point. But there are significant questions about whether recently appointed inspectors general have met that standard, including ones who were previously political appointees in the agencies they now oversee or were partisan political actors. Their backgrounds not only cast significant doubt on their independence but also raise risks that this crucial function may be weaponized to investigate enemies of the administration.

Inspectors general were once thought to be insulated from dismissal, which enabled them to investigate and expose problematic agency activity without fear of repercussion. This may no longer be the case. At the beginning of his second term, President Trump took the unprecedented step of firing more than a dozen inspectors general overnight. He has since fired others for raising issues viewed as a threat to his administration’s priorities. Recent Supreme Court decisions upholding the president’s right to dismiss federal officials regardless of statutory protections call into question any legislative effort to shield inspectors general.

Taken together, these developments send a clear message: Avoid controversy and stick to safe topics, or risk losing your job. To the extent that any independent inspectors general remain, their ability to safeguard their independence is being severely tested, and the reward for doing so is scant.

These government watchdogs are being starved of money and staffing. According to one account, their overall staff has been reduced by about 12 percent from 2024 levels. The Trump administration has proposed a further 23 percent reduction in inspector general budgets between 2025 and 2031. This sustained and systemic chipping away at these officials’ effectiveness and independence reflects an administration disinterested in oversight, notwithstanding well-documented evidence that funding inspectors general saves the government money.

The results of the systematic cuts are clear: According to the Partnership for Public Service, inspectors general offices overseeing cabinet departments issued 6 percent fewer audit reports and 25 percent fewer investigative reports, on average, in the first half of FY 2026 compared with previous periods, with some issuing up to 30 percent fewer audit and investigative reports. These watchdogs are also taking longer to issue their mandatory semiannual reports to Congress. The Department of Education Office of Inspector General, in particular, has issued 66 percent fewer reports in the first half of 2026 compared to historical levels. This should come as no surprise given that its acting inspector general was fired after informing Congress that the department was stonewalling access to information, and his replacement was found to be publishing partisan political social media posts favoring the administration on his personal accounts.

An inspector general’s effectiveness is tied to credibility, and that credibility is tied to independence. Trust and credibility are built over time, bolstered by a scaffold of both professional standards and personal integrity. The perception of independence is as important as independence in fact. Unfortunately, it can be lost overnight. And that is precisely what has happened.

Even if we could return to the time when norms and laws guaranteed the independence of inspectors general, their effectiveness would not be assured. The system has not consistently served as an effective check on agency waste and misconduct, as it is highly dependent on the qualities of the individual inspector general, with significant historical examples of leaders who fell short of the expected standards of integrity necessary for the position. For decades, critics have pointed out such examples in congressional testimony. Indeed, job protections sometimes have insulated demonstrably bad inspectors general whose dismissal would have seemed partisan. 

Moreover, only about half the watchdogs had some purported protection against removal. The Inspector General Act of 1978 designates 31 out of the 74 inspectors general as working for so-called “Designated Federal Entities,” which by statute are appointed by the agency head rather than the president and are likewise subject to dismissal by the head of the agency. These are significant agencies with considerable budgets and huge reach into the daily life of Americans, yet their watchdogs are subject to dismissal by the very individuals they are charged with overseeing. Their independence would not be protected solely by returning to previous norms that prevented dismissal by the president.

Even when not demonstrably lacking independence or integrity, a significant core of inspectors general simply does not engage in valuable reviews. As far back as 2011, Paul Light, a longtime observer of government oversight mechanisms, observed that some merely “occupy their space, pursuing a dog’s breakfast of issues, the bare minimum under the IG statute. . . . I have yet to read an IG report that is getting to the core driver of waste, fraud and abuse.”

More recently, a former member of the inspector general community put it aptly: “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.” Too many reports tend to be dry, highly jargoned documents that are unlikely to instigate meaningful reform in agency operations. Moreover, audits can take so long to develop, often lasting a year or more, that they are limited in their utility when they are published.

What is the answer to the inspector general problem? If the norms surrounding job protections have burst — and weren’t very effective to begin with in producing meaningful oversight within an agency — what can be done to create a more effective internal oversight mechanism?

There is no single or immediate cure, but there are three critical first steps.

First, Congress must reengage. Inspectors general report to two separate entities: the head of the agency they oversee and Congress. It is a symbiotic relationship, in that Congress benefits by receiving information about agency activities, which is crucial for oversight, and the watchdogs in turn are protected from agency retaliation by Congress’s political support.

The anemic response to the recent intentional and systemic dismantlement of the inspectors general offices reflects that Congress is hardly incentivized to support probes into the actions of political appointees when the congressional majority and the administration are of the same party. In those circumstances, the minority party is unable to conduct oversight or prod the inspectors general to do so. The executive branch — backed by long-standing Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel opinions — takes the position that agencies and inspectors general are only constitutionally obligated to respond to official committee requests. Because such requests usually require a committee vote or the committee chair’s signature, the minority party is often reduced to sending strongly worded letters that carry no legal weight, and it is thus prevented from obtaining information.

Moreover, Congress has little institutional expertise regarding inspectors general, especially as it relates to auditing standards. While the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee have nominal jurisdiction over inspector general issues, the reality is that each watchdog answers to a different committee of jurisdiction, distributing both expertise and authority too broadly across Congress.

Congress must rethink its relationship with the inspectors general. It should create subcommittees in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee dedicated to inspector general oversight and meaningfully staff them with experts in government oversight and auditing standards. Those subcommittees should commit to regular hearings, including on these offices’ independence and access to information. Additionally, to ensure that oversight is bipartisan, the subcommittees should have special rules empowering each chair and ranking member to subpoena or request information. Alternatively, Congress should amend the Inspectors General Act to require that inspectors general respond to information requests from either the chair or ranking member. 

Second, the norms and governance surrounding inspector general independence must be reinvigorated. A well-developed body of norms for government auditors, which includes inspectors general, already exists: the Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards, colloquially known as the Yellow Book, promulgated by the Government Accountability Office. It sets forth standards for independence, integrity, and objectivity, modeled after similar standards that govern auditors in publicly traded companies. While the public may see this as an obscure backwater of little consequence, in the auditing community these are the governing professional rules, as central to auditors as the legal ethics rules are to lawyers. Inspectors general must undergo a self-evaluation of seven enumerated threats to their independence and objectivity. But they rarely fulfill this requirement, and in the absence of accountability or external governance, they are able to ignore their independence obligations with impunity.

The most obvious governance structure, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, is currently ineffective. The current administration has impeded its functioning by periodically defunding it and proposing its elimination. The council’s present structure, as a peer group driven by consensus, ensures its ineffectiveness. While it manages a peer review function, in which an inspector general office reviews one of its counterparts, the exercise is largely meaningless. For example, the watchdog at the Defense Department recently evaluated its counterpart at the Department of Homeland Security and gave it a clean bill of health, notwithstanding the well-documented failures of the DHS inspector general to maintain its independence. In addition, while public, such reviews are largely buried and difficult to find.

In addition to the peer review function, the council has an integrity committee, whose function is to review complaints against inspectors general. It has been rightly criticized for being under-resourced and failing to follow its own procedures. The committee is forced to borrow resources from other inspectors general, which is not a priority for those offices, resulting in significant delays in completing investigations.

The council should be reinvigorated to function as a watchdog of the watchdogs and a thought leader for government auditing independence. The chair is currently an inspector general elected by peers to take on the additional responsibility of overseeing the council; it should be a full-time, presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed position. The person filling this role should have the background and experience to be seen as a first among equals in the inspector general community and as a champion for their independence. To that end, the council should be funded through a direct budget appropriation, sufficient to fund a full-time staff to conduct meaningful reviews of inspector general offices, focusing on independence, integrity, and accountability. Most importantly, it should review the offices against the standards of the Yellow Book and be required to publicly report those findings to the president and the new congressional subcommittees.

Finally, there must be a renewed effort by civil society — including nonprofits, investigative journalists, and advocacy groups — to educate the public about the value of independent government oversight. When civil society raises public awareness of government watchdog issues, agency operations become far more transparent, ensuring government institutions remain truly accountable to the people they serve. By translating complex inspector general reports into accessible stories, nongovernment organizations can raise public awareness and demand policy accountability. Increased attention to the issue by civil society groups can help establish a core of expertise that can act as a center of thought leadership, which can assist Congress and the inspector general community as they work to reinvigorate this important tool for effective oversight.

John Roth was the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security from 2014 to 2017. Prior to that, he was a federal prosecutor for 25 years.