Congressional Oversight, Inspector Generals, GAO Reports, and the Perennial Question of Whether Anyone Is Actually in Charge
Congressional Oversight, Inspector Generals, GAO Reports, and the Perennial Question of Whether Anyone Is Actually in Charge
The Theory: Someone Is Always Watching
The American system of government accountability rests on the assumption that no actor operates without oversight. Congress oversees the executive branch. The judiciary reviews both. Inspectors general – independent watchdogs embedded in each federal agency – audit programs and investigate wrongdoing. The Government Accountability Office – Congress’s auditing arm – studies programs and issues reports. Inspectors general issue findings. Whistleblowers reveal misconduct. The free press exposes failures. The system of oversight is, in theory, comprehensive, redundant, and robust. In theory.
In practice, oversight is episodic, understaffed, politically selective, and chronically dependent on the willingness of the overseers to actually oversee the people who, in many cases, control their budgets, their committee assignments, and their reelection prospects. Congressional oversight is most vigorous when the committee chairs are from the party opposite to the administration being investigated, least vigorous when they are from the same party, and zero when the same party controls everything and has concluded that investigating its own administration is counterproductive to its electoral interests. This pattern is not corruption. It is incentive alignment, which is a more neutral description of the same phenomenon.
Congressional Oversight: The Hearing as Theater and Occasionally as Tool
Congressional hearings are the most visible form of oversight. A committee summons an executive branch official, a CEO, a general, a public health administrator. The official testifies. Committee members ask questions in five-minute increments, which is exactly long enough to deliver a prepared statement designed for the evening news and approximately insufficient to extract useful information from a prepared witness who has been briefed by lawyers to say as little as possible while appearing cooperative. The resulting exchange is rarely illuminating as a fact-finding exercise. It is frequently illuminating as a display of the committee members’ rhetorical priorities, political positioning, and ability to work the phrase “”the American people deserve answers”” into a question that doesn’t actually require one.
Occasionally, oversight hearings do produce accountability. The Church Committee’s 1975 investigation of intelligence agency abuses led to structural reforms that constrained surveillance for decades. The Watergate hearings contributed to a president’s resignation. The post-9/11 commission’s findings produced the largest reorganization of the intelligence community in 50 years. These are genuine achievements of the oversight function. They are also relatively rare compared to the volume of hearings conducted, most of which produce reports that are read by staff, filed, and occasionally cited in subsequent reports about the same unresolved problems. The oversight infrastructure is extensive. Its conversion rate – hearings to accountability to reform – is modest. This is either a feature of the system (investigations that don’t produce findings still deter misconduct) or a bug (investigations that don’t produce consequences encourage it). Both propositions have empirical support. The hearings continue.
Inspectors General: The Internal Watchdogs Nobody Talks About
Each major federal agency has an Inspector General – an independent official, confirmed by the Senate, responsible for auditing agency programs and investigating fraud, waste, and abuse. There are 74 federal inspectors general. They employ approximately 14,000 staff. They produce thousands of reports per year documenting program deficiencies, financial irregularities, and policy failures. These reports are available to the public. They are read by specialists, oversight advocates, and journalists who cover federal agencies. They are largely unknown to the general public, because they are not interesting enough for cable news and not dramatic enough for social media, which means the most systematic source of federal accountability information in the American government operates in persistent public obscurity while the cable news panel debates whether the relevant cabinet secretary should resign.
Inspectors general depend for their effectiveness on both independence and cooperation. Independence allows them to investigate without fear of retaliation from agency leadership. Cooperation from agency leadership allows them to access records, interview employees, and obtain the information necessary to conduct meaningful investigations. When an administration is hostile to oversight – when agency heads block access, dismiss findings, or remove inspectors general who have produced unwanted results – the IG system degrades. When administrations are cooperative – when findings are taken seriously and reforms are actually implemented – the system works as designed. The variability between these states is high, and its distribution over time is not random; it correlates with the administration’s interest in the findings that the IG system is likely to produce, which is another way of saying that oversight works best when the people being overseen want to be found not to have done anything wrong, and worst precisely when the most oversight is needed.
The GAO: The Auditors Who Report to No One Reads Their Reports
The Government Accountability Office is the investigative arm of Congress, employing approximately 3,000 professional staff who analyze federal programs, audit financial statements, and assess policy outcomes. The GAO issues approximately 900 reports per year. These reports are methodologically rigorous, politically neutral (the GAO has a strong institutional commitment to non-partisanship), and frequently alarming in their findings. The GAO has documented, over decades, persistent problems with the Defense Department’s financial accounting (which has never passed an audit, despite years of effort), recurring failures in federal IT procurement (billions spent on systems that don’t work), systematic management deficiencies in federal healthcare programs, and a “”high-risk list”” of government programs and operations that have been identified as particularly vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement – a list that currently includes 37 items and has included many of the same items for multiple consecutive decades.
The GAO’s recommendations are adopted at a rate of approximately 77%, which sounds impressive until you consider that the 23% not adopted includes many of the most consequential recommendations about the most entrenched problems, and that adoption of a recommendation does not always mean the underlying problem is resolved, since agencies can formally adopt a recommendation while implementing it in ways that address the letter but not the substance of the finding. The GAO continues. The reports continue. The high-risk list continues. The Defense Department has still never passed an audit. The oversight apparatus watches. Whether it is changing what it watches is the question accountability was supposed to answer, and the answer, based on the evidence available, is: partially, selectively, and not nearly as much as the theory would predict. The watchmen are watching. The watchmen are also writing reports about watching. The reports are filed. The problems continue. Democracy, in this as in so much else, is a work in progress whose completion date has not been announced.
SOURCE: The London Prat