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On the Need for Oversight [1]
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Date: 2022-11-12
It’s been almost seven years since the Senate appointed anyone to the Pentagon’s top oversight role, as stated by Connor Echols in his story “There Hasn’t Been a Confirmed Pentagon Watchdog since Obama was President.”
The last time our county had a nominee in this position was when billionaire Donald Trump was making his first run for the presidency. Pentagon Inspector General Jon Rymer, who stepped down on Jan. 6, 2016, was the last man in the position. President Barack Obama appointed Glenn Fine to head the office in an acting capacity until he could receive Senate confirmation.
However, confirmation never came. President Donald Trump didn’t put forward a nominee for the role until 2020. That nomination lapsed when President Joe Biden took office, after which it took the Democratic leader almost a year to name his own candidate.
Today, more than six years after the last confirmed IG, Congress has still not signed off on a nominee to serve as the top watchdog of one of the government’s largest, most well-funded agencies. Fine argued in a recent op-ed that an “acting” agency head is simply not the same as a “permanent office holder” and that this gap is a loss for government oversight.
In Echols’ story, Lynne Halbrooks, who served as a temporary IG in the 2010’s, spoke of the impact of going without an IG has on the office.
“It affects the morale of the IG’s office in particular,” Halbrooks said. adding that a long vacancy in the office’s top role could be “devastating” to internal operations, “which ultimately might have an effect on the oversight mission.”
Politicians love to talk about how fiscally responsible they are. Any concerned citizen must admit with an ever-rising Pentagon budget and more than a billion dollars’ worth of weapons flowing from the United States to Ukraine each month, the Defense Department has rarely had such a need for oversight. Echols spoke of the procedure problems of acquiring the services of another IG: “following Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) decided to block all Pentagon and State Department nominees from receiving “unanimous consent” in the Senate, a procedural roadblock that can only be overturned through a floor debate. While Senate leaders have taken the time to overrule Hawley’s block for some other nominees, none has been willing to do so to help DoD IG nominee Robert Storch, who has awaited Senate approval since his nomination advanced past the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. Given Storch’s long experience in watchdog roles, his confirmation should have been a formality, according to Joanna Derman of the Project on Government Oversight.”
It’s important to note that the problems with government watchdogs go beyond this case. Since the first Pentagon IG took office in 1983, an acting IG has held the job approximately 40 percent of the time, hobbling the office’s oversight capabilities in ways that we will never truly know. And other major agencies, including the State Department, also lack a confirmed inspector general today.
But the current delay in confirming a new Pentagon IG is by far the longest in the history of the office. Politicians love to talk about how they’re skeptical of the efficiency of our government. Shouldn’t we have someone to oversee the biggest of all government agencies?
Jason Sibert is the Lead Writer for the Peace Economy
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