Watchdogs or lapdogs? A system meant to protect the public has been co-opted by the feds

But too often the watchdogs become lapdogs, whitewashing reports about agency wrongdoing, spiking information about misdeeds by higher-ups and at times attacking the very people who risk their careers to report misconduct.

In the past few years, allegations of cover-ups or retaliation have been leveled against the inspectors general at a half-dozen Cabinet-level agencies.

Embarrassing information has been purged from investigative reports. Findings that run contrary to political priorities of the Obama administration have been soft-peddled or deleted.

Even investigators inside several IG offices have faced retaliation for reporting internal wrongdoing or attempts to bury embarrassing findings, according to congressional reports.

Yet despite pressure from Congress and outside watchdog groups, weak IGs have little to fear.

The president of the United States appoints them, and he is the only one who can fire them.

“Too many IGs are concerned about their status within the agency,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who for 20 years has been the champion of whistleblowers and the bane of weak inspectors general. “Anybody that’s playing that game shouldn’t be an inspector general. IGs have to exercise their independence from political control.”

Inspectors general are the creation of a 1978 reform law passed in the wake of scandals over misspending and misconduct at federal agencies. There are now 72 IGs throughout the federal government.

Though these IGs are housed within the agencies, they are supposed to be independent of influence from department heads or top executives.

But a recurring complaint about some IGs is that they are too cozy with agency management. Since only the president can fire them, there is inherent pressure to please the White House and its politically appointed department heads, who prefer to keep embarrassing information IGs might uncover from being exposed, according to critics in Congress and outside watchdog groups.

While on paper IGs are answerable both to Congress and the president, the reality is there is little anyone outside the administration can do to force them to do their jobs.

Recent controversies have erupted at IG offices big and small.

Damning information about high-level misconduct has been scrubbed from IG reports at the departments of State, Defense, Homeland Security, Interior and numerous smaller federal agencies, according to congressional investigations.

The Commerce Department IG has been rebuked for retaliating against his own people by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and two congressional committees.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, the acting inspector general is under fire for inserting language in a high-profile report downplaying whistleblower claims and absolving the agency of blame for patient deaths, despite confirming the use of phony scheduling practices to hide delays in care.

Whistleblowers who have turned to Congress or the media routinely say inspectors general failed to investigate their charges of wrongdoing, then idly watched as their bosses subjected them to brutal retaliation for turning to outsiders.

The worst offenders tend to be inspectors general who are in interim positions, meaning they have not been recommended for permanent appointment by the president or confirmed by the Senate.

There are now 10 interim inspectors general, and many of them have been in acting positions for years.

Mary Kendall at the Interior Department has had the longest tenure as a temporary IG, having taken over in 2009.

Even permanent IGs are subject to pressure to avoid embarrassing the administration or agency heads, critics say. That pressure is magnified for interim IGs, especially those bucking for the permanent job.

“Interim IGs are more likely to become lapdogs of an administration,” said Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif. “They are seen as temporary occupants of their offices without a genuine mandate from the administration and Congress.”

Royce is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which mounted a bipartisan effort to get a permanent IG named at the State Department. They finally succeeded when Steve Linick was confirmed to the job in September 2013 — after the department went nearly six years with temporary IGs.

Interims who are too aggressive risk alienating agency managers, who often have a say in who gets appointed to the permanent position, said Michael Smallberg, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Their findings can also embarrass the president, particularly if inappropriate White House meddling is exposed.

“The concern is that someone who is in that long-term acting position may be easier to influence, may be more prone to soft-peddling his reports or findings, especially if it is well known that he is angling for the permanent job,” Smallberg said.

“There is always going to be an appearance problem unless you have someone in place who is truly independent and can assure he is going to follow all the clues where they lead, and that he is not captured by the very people that he is supposed to be investigating,” Smallberg said.

What happened at the State Department illustrates a litany of long-running problems with weak inspectors general, and how quickly the cover-up culture can change with a more aggressive leader.

Before Linick was confirmed, the State IG office was run by Harold Geisel, an acting inspector general who was handpicked by agency managers.

Geisel spent 25 years in State Department management, reaching ambassador rank before becoming acting inspector general in 2008.

By law, career Foreign Service Officers cannot become permanent IGs because that would create a conflict of interest. But since Geisel was considered “acting,” that restriction did not apply to him.

Geisel is a personal friend of Patrick Kennedy, under secretary for management at State, according to documents obtained by POGO.

Geisel’s loyalty was tested in 2011, when allegations of widespread criminal misconduct by top State officials surfaced.

The ambassador to Belgium, a big campaign bundler for President Obama, was accused of soliciting sex in a park near the U.S. Embassy in Brussels.

Members of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s security detail were accused of hiring prostitutes, and a security official at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals, according to the complaints.

The Diplomatic Security Service, a law enforcement branch of the department, tried to investigate the charges but was blocked by top agency managers including Kennedy and Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, according to whistleblower allegations that surfaced later.

DSS agents reported the interference to the IG, which confirmed the pressure from the top. A draft report written in November 2012 described the underlying cases of misconduct and the strong-arm tactics top managers used to block the DSS investigation.

But that draft report was not made public. Instead, it was shown to top State Department officials who wanted it scrubbed of damaging information.

“This is going to kill us,” one top agency official reportedly said upon seeing the draft, according to CBS News, which later obtained the document.

When the final IG report was issued in February 2013, it made no mention of the individual cases or management’s pressure to kill the DSS investigations. Instead, it stated that DSS “lacks a firewall” to prevent management meddling with its investigations.

The more candid draft was leaked by an investigator inside the IG’s office to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and to CBS News.

Royce demanded copies of the draft report and details about the specific cases of misconduct. The IG’s office refused to provide them.

“There is every indication that critical information was missing from the IG report submitted to Congress,” Royce told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview.

“And whether it was State’s pressure to remove it or Geisel’s unwillingness to include it, the result was the same,” Royce said. “We were not, as required by law, kept fully and currently informed. The bottom line is when federal agencies lack a Senate-confirmed, independent inspector general, the potential for malfeasance really abounds.”

Under pressure from Congress, and in the wake of revelations that agency management influenced the IG’s final report, Obama appointed Linick in June 2013, less than a month after CBS broke the news about the IG cover-up.

Linick launched a new investigation, and in October 2014 confirmed that at least three of the DSS investigations were blocked by top management officials at State, including the one involving the ambassador that was spiked by Kennedy.

While the new IG report was critical of agency management for blocking the DSS investigations, it said nothing negative about the original inspector general’s findings.

Linick refused to be interviewed. His spokesman, Douglas Welty, refused to discuss whether damaging information was covered up under Geisel.

“We stand by both reports,” Welty said.

Similar problems have surfaced at other agencies.

In 2013, Lynne Halbrooks, interim IG at the Department of Defense, was accused of covering up embarrassing findings involving former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. A draft IG report found that Panetta disclosed top secret information to the screenwriter of the film “Zero Dark Thirty,” which documented the killing of Osama bin Laden. That finding was scrubbed from the final report released in June 2013 but was revealed when POGO obtained and published a copy of the draft.

Jon Rymer was named the permanent Defense Department IG a week after the final report was released.

At the Department of Homeland Security, interim IG Charles Edwards, who sought the permanent appointment, was accused by one of his own investigators of covering up an embarrassing report on the Secret Service prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, until after the 2012 presidential election.

One item that surfaced recently: A member of the White House advance team may have taken a prostitute to his hotel room.

The final IG report was issued in January 2013, two months after Obama was re-elected.

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, issued in April 2014, confirmed information that was embarrassing to the agency “was altered or removed” from the IG’s report on the prostitution scandal.

Edwards “directed reports to be altered or delayed to accommodate senior DHS officials,” the committee report found.

“Mr. Edwards jeopardized the independence of the DHS Office of Inspector General,” the report said. “Mr. Edwards did not understand the importance of independence.”

Edwards abruptly resigned in December 2013, three days before he was to testify in front of a Senate homeland security subcommittee investigating whether he was too soft on the agency. John Roth became the permanent DHS inspector general in March 2014, a month before the Senate report was released.

At the Interior Department, Kendall, the acting IG, personally watered down a report about renewable energy programs favored by the administration, according to an investigation by the House Natural Resources Committee. Kendall deleted negative findings while retaining information favorable to the administration’s policies. She eventually killed the report after her own investigator objected to her “glad handing” with department management.

On another occasion, Kendall’s chief of staff arbitrarily closed an investigation into retaliation against an agency scientist who questioned the scientific validity of statements in a department document that backed an administration priority.

Kendall even agreed to serve on a policymaking committee appointed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, then refused to acknowledge a conflict of interest when her office investigated whether misleading statements were made in the committee’s final recommendations.

When her own investigator complained that the White House was hindering the investigation, Kendall ordered him to back off, then had any reference to stonewalling deleted from the final IG report, according to the Natural Resources Committee investigation.

Kendall would not agree to be interviewed by the Examiner.

More recently, Department of Veterans Affairs acting IG Richard Griffin came under fire by the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee for rewriting a critical report on falsified patient records at the behest of agency administrators.

Griffin was directed to investigate allegations of falsified patient appointment lists at the Phoenix VA hospital in April, after whistleblower claims were revealed by the House veterans’ committee.

Despite confirming that the use of bogus wait lists to hide delays in care was nationwide, “systemic” and potentially criminal, the final IG report on the scandal included a line that investigators could not “conclusively assert” delays caused patient deaths.

That language was not in a draft version of the report sent to agency executives for review, but was inserted in the final version that was released in August.

Griffin insisted the sentence discounting patient deaths was added by senior IG staff, not because of pressure from agency managers. He backed off the conclusion under grilling by the House veterans’ committee in September, conceding the delays may have contributed to deaths.

Griffin is also under scrutiny by the committee for a line in the final report that says the key whistleblower from the Phoenix hospital, Dr. Sam Foote, did not provide the names of 40 patients he believed may have died while on phony waiting lists.

That disclaimer was sought by VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson, according to emails obtained by the Examiner. It was included in the final report even though the IG investigation confirmed 293 patients died at the Phoenix hospital while on various official and unofficial wait lists — a figure that was not cited in the final report and came out only in subsequent congressional testimony.

A transcript of Foote’s interview with the IG was distributed during the September House committee hearing. Griffin asked that it be entered into the hearing record, but committee members refused to do so out of fear it could have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers.

Foote said he initially reported the falsification of wait times to the IG in October 2013. He said he turned to the House veterans’ committee after the IG showed little interest.

Releasing the interview transcript was an attempt to discredit him over details, Foote said, even though the substance of his allegations was confirmed and triggered a nationwide scandal that led to the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.

“It was totally retaliatory,” Foote told the Examiner. “They were definitely taking a shot at me. I don’t think the IG was ever on my side. I looked at them as adversarial from the start.”

Retaliation is a common complaint raised by whistleblowers.

The pattern they describe is predictable: The whistleblower reports wrongdoing to the inspector general. The IG does nothing except forward the complaint to the agency. The agency retaliates against the whistleblower.

“They never listen to whistleblowers,” Grassley said. “They are punishing whistleblowers instead of considering them good, patriotic Americans.”

Inspectors general are supposed to protect whistleblowers who come forward with information about waste, fraud and abuse within their agencies. But too often IGs provide little protection to whistleblowers; they simply turn their allegations over to the agencies themselves to investigate, critics say.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel singled out the VA for criticism in a letter to Obama in June 2014. Though Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner did not criticize the IG, she did note a “years-long pattern of disclosure from whistleblowers and their struggle to overcome a culture of non-responsiveness” at the agency.

When IGs do not aggressively follow up on whistleblower allegations, problems do not get fixed, said Chris Farrell, director of research and investigation at Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

When whistleblowers wind up on a department’s “enemies list” and face retaliation, others are discouraged from coming forward to report wrongdoing, he said.

“They are frequently demonized or labeled as malcontents or as a non-team player,” Farrell said of whistleblowers. “They are frequently accused of doing things they haven’t done.”

Retaliation can range from negative performance reviews and reprimands to termination and criminal investigations launched by the IGs themselves, Farrell and other outside watchdogs say.

Agency administrators sometimes send whistleblowers for mental health counseling because they challenge or expose unethical practices, Farrell said.

“I don’t know what’s more Stalinist than that,” he said.

Even investigators within IG offices have claimed they were retaliated against for refusing to cover up embarrassing information about agency management.

A half-dozen employees of the Commerce IG’s office filed retaliation complaints in 2012 and 2013, an unusually high number for an office that size, according to congressional investigators.

In 2013, OSC rebuked Commerce IG Todd Zinser for allowing his top deputies to use coercive tactics to secure gag orders against four departing employees.

Last year, the acting IG at the Pentagon, Halbrooks, launched an internal investigation to find out who leaked the findings about Panetta’s disclosure of secret information to the “Zero Dark Thirty” screenwriter.

Though she did not find out who leaked the document to POGO, she did threaten the security clearance of a top executive in her office in charge of whistleblower protection. His offense was to provide a copy of the draft findings to a congressional oversight committee.

While there are ample critics of weak inspectors general, there are few suggestions for balancing IG independence with accountability.

Even though on paper IGs answer jointly to the president and Congress, the reality is there is little Congress can do to force IGs to do their jobs or quit.

“It’s hard to remove an IG,” said Texas Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, ranking Democrat on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which has spent nearly two years investigating retaliation complaints against Zinser at Commerce.

“The Congress can investigate IGs for misconduct, but generally if an IG is a bad IG, they lack the integrity to quit even when caught doing something wrong,” Johnson said. “In our effort to make sure that IGs can be independent from political pressure, Congress may have gone too far in making it hard to remove an IG.”

The committee has blasted Zinser for retaliation within his office in a series of bipartisan letters since February 2013.

Zinser “built an official record that casts doubt on your reliability, veracity, trustworthiness, and ethical conduct,” say the letters, which are typically signed by the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat of both the full committee and its oversight subcommittee.

“When an IG cannot effectively serve as a watchdog due to their own illegal conduct or lack of ethical grounding, that IG cannot maintain the trust and confidence of the Congress, agency employees, or the public,” the science committee concluded.

Similar concerns have been raised by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Other congressional committees have clashed with inspectors general accused of manipulating their reports to protect agency managers or foster their policies.

The House Natural Resources Committee issued a subpoena earlier this year to force acting Interior IG Kendall to release an unredacted report on watershed regulations. It was the committee’s third subpoena on the subject since April 2012.

“We certainly believe that they are holding back information,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., the committee chairman. “That is just contrary to what open government should be about.”

The most cited reform to make IGs accountable is stricter time limits for acting inspectors general, who serve as temporary caretakers until a permanent IG is appointed and confirmed.

Interim IGs are not supposed to serve for more than 210 days. But there are work-arounds, such as changing job titles, that have allowed some agencies to go years without a permanent IG.

POGO recommends requiring the authors of IG reports to sign off on final findings and recommendations to lessen the chance their conclusions will be watered down to protect agency managers.

POGO also wants a requirement that IGs can only be fired for cause to increase their independence. But Smallberg, the POGO investigator, acknowledged that could make it even harder to fire a weak inspector general.

Cutting agency budgets or blocking the confirmation of presidential appointees also have been mentioned as tools Congress can use to force the president to deal with a problematic inspector general.

Dan Epstein, executive director of the outside watchdog group Cause of Action, said slashing the budget of a weak IG can pressure the president to find a replacement, but added he is not aware of that ever having been done.

“There’s obviously a political cost of doing that,” he said.

Grassley said the most effective tool Congress has to drive out weak IGs is publicly shaming them to pressure the president to deal with the problem.

“If every congressman would take a look at IGs and support them or get rid of them accordingly by going public, I think it would make a big difference,” he said.

Ultimately, what separates good IGs from bad ones is their own personal integrity and willingness to follow a trail of wrongdoing no matter how high up it leads, watchdogs say.

“The operating principle is the IG is going to have the moral courage to do the right thing, even when the institution or the people in power don’t want to,” said Farrell of Judicial Watch. “They are supposed to have the guts to do that, even if it’s unpleasant or awkward or embarrassing. When they flip on that, there is a corrosive effect on the agency and the Constitution.”