Without Fear or Favor: The Climate within the Inspector General Community
In March of 2025, Former Inspector General of the Department of the Interior Mark Lee Greenblatt and I discussed the firing of the Inspectors General and its far-reaching implications for the country. With the blizzard of Executive Orders, high profile government firings and other maneuvers that appear to continue to tear down government agencies, it would be easy to forget about firing of the IGs and the long term consequences. Mark Lee Greenblatt is making it his mission so that the American people don’t lost sight of that fact. At the time of the firing of the IGs, we could only engage in conjecture as to what the long-term implications would be.
In Mark’s own words, he provided insights into the current state of the close-knit IG community. “There are 14,000 members in the community and the various federal OIGs sprinkled throughout the government. They are hardworking auditors, inspectors, evaluators, investigators who are still cranking out good work. So it’s not like there’s nothing being done.”
“You look at the FAA, the Department of Transportation IG just announced that they’re looking at the crash at Reagan National Airport where 60, 70 folks died. There’s that being done. The flooding in Texas, the Department of Commerce IG is looking at that. The VA IG just issued a report about staffing inadequacy in the VA. So there is fundamental work being done, but the concern that I have, and this is borne out in a front page article in the New York Times just a few days ago, relates to that potential fear in the IG community, what the New York Times was talking about from numerous interviews of people inside the community that there’s palpable fear at the senior levels of retaliation for doing good work.”
“And so the part that makes me concerned that keeps me up at night is those politically sensitive matters, politically sensitive cases where the president would rise to the president’s attention or would rise to agency leadership’s attention. Are they going to retaliate against OIG leadership for coming up with negative findings regardless of whether they’re based in the evidence and that sort of thing? That is very problematic from my point of view. And more importantly, I have great confidence in the community, but I think every American should be concerned. Are they going to avoid doing politically sensitive matters, reviewing politically sensitive investigations or audits or what have you, out of fear of the outcomes, out of fear of their jobs. That is the thing that keeps me up at night.”
Mark and I also discussed what he and I both consider to be potentially a watershed moment in the IG community. And that has to do with the acting IG in the Department of Defense who’s conducting a review, not an investigation of Defense Secretary Hegseth’s use of an unclassified messaging app – Signal – to discuss airstrikes on Iran backed Houthis operating out of Yemen. It came to light because they had accidentally included a reporter on the invite and he signed on. Does a matter like this have the potential to kind of reestablish IGs in the rightful place in government or could this be the IG equivalent of the Alamo?
Mark expressed hope that the acting IG can do their job in an unfettered way, that they get access to all the witnesses, that they get access to all the documents, and that they can write whatever their findings are without getting shut down. “This is an important point, the Secretary of Defense actually has a unique authority to shut down IG reviews if he, in his determination negatively impacts national security interests. That is a unique authority unlike the Department of the Interior. They didn’t have that. The Secretary of the Interior couldn’t tell me to shut something down. The Secretary of Defense can, which in certain circumstances, is appropriate. … But in this situation, would the ability to do that, to shut that review down, would that be too tempting for them?”
To hear the entire conversation with former U.S. Department of the Interior Inspector General Mark Lee Greenblatt, access it here.
