Earlier this week, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, took to the House floor to call for the removal of Commerce Inspector General Todd Zinser. “The evidence the committee obtained regarding Mr. Zinser’s personal misconduct and professional mismanagement of his office is overwhelming,” she said, before laying that evidence out in great detail.
The bipartisan investigation into Zinser’s conduct in office began in 2012, when a financial scandal was revealed at the National Weather Service. Federal employees there had illegally reprogrammed $36 million of the agency’s budget without consulting Congress. They been doing this since 2006.
The House Science Committee noticed not only this fraud, but also the fact that Zinser, the Inspector General for the relevant cabinet department, had apparently known about it and looked the other way.
His decision in 2011 to let the agency investigate itself over this matter, which Johnson called “inexplicable,” led the committee to scrutinize his work further. They found a lot of ugliness when they scratched the surface.
First, there were indications that Zinser had also spent at least two years looking the other way from another long-running scandal involving abuse of telecommuting by about a dozen employees at the Patent and Trademark Office.
There were also accusations that Zinser had retaliated against and muzzled whistleblowers in his office, giving them failing performance reviews, threatening them, and imposing a gag order upon them. He also covertly collected the emails of senior staff he viewed as disloyal, attempting to find material he might be able to “use against” them, Johnson said.
Then there were accusations of nepotism. His milder offense was the hiring of one of his son’s friends to a $42,000 job. The more serious one occurred when he hired a woman he at first denied but later admitted was his girlfriend. In August 2010, he hastily transferred her from another office of the Commerce Department to his own office just as her supervisors were about to discipline her over her “significant conduct problems.” After hiring his girlfriend, Zinser promoted her to a senior position, raising her pay to $150,000, and awarded her $28,000 in performance bonuses on top of that in less than two years.
When an inspector general goes bad, the words of the Roman poet Juvenal come to mind: “Who will guard the guards themselves?” Inspectors general are on the front lines detecting waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies. Their independence is highly valued and enshrined in law. Unfortunately, the same laws that protect government watchdogs from illicit retribution appear to be protecting the jobs of certain bad eggs.
Perhaps to some extent it has to be this way. If the Inspector General Act were weakened to make bad Inspectors General easy to fire, this would be abused and used against the good ones. Perhaps, in the interest of good government, a bad inspector general has to be tolerated for a little while every now and then.
Even so, inspectors general need to act with the integrity their offices are supposed to impose on all others in government. Moreover, President Obama has the power to end this. He has shown that he is willing to fire Inspectors General — even in cases where it is controversial and unclear whether he is doing the right thing. Here is a chance for him to do the right thing without anyone questioning his motives or raising controversy.
