Flouting Norms, Trump Seeks to Bring Independent Watchdogs to Heel [View all]
WASHINGTON — Congress had a clear idea of the role it expected inspectors general to play when it created them in 1978 after the Watergate scandals. They were to be dispersed in the agencies and departments of the federal government not as compliant team members but in-house referees, charged with rooting out corruption, waste, malfeasance and illegality.
As their numbers increased in the four decades since, inspectors general have played that role in bureaucracies as vast as the Pentagon and as tiny as the Denali Commission, charged with developing infrastructure in Alaska. It was an inspector general who in 2003 discovered that the C.I.A. was using unauthorized techniques to torture detainees and an inspector general who brought to light billions of dollars wasted in reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.
But President Trump has made clear that he has little use for this kind of independent oversight, which he sees as yet another form of resistance from the so-called Deep State. “I think we’ve been treated very unfairly by inspector generals,” he said this week.
And now he has launched a full-fledged — and at moments quite innovative — attack on the ability of inspectors general to investigate his administration.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/flouting-norms-trump-seeks-to-bring-independent-watchdogs-to-heel/ar-BB14tEuA?li=BBnbcA1
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