Accountability in Government: Glenn Fine on the Crucial Role of Inspectors General, the Government's Watchdogs

Glenn Fine: There is waste, fraud, and abuse in government. There’s no question about it. That shouldn’t be a partisan issue. And IGs are one of the critical components that point it out and make recommendations to improve it. And so rather than make them political, or remove them if there’s a hard-hitting report, they should be encouraged. They shouldn’t be isolated. They should be empowered.

Pam Karlan: This is Stanford Legal, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day. I’m Pam Karlan. Please subscribe or follow this feed on your favorite podcast app. That way, you’ll have access to all our new episodes as soon as they’re available.

One of the first things Donald Trump did when he came back into office on January 20th of this year was create the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, named in a kind of juvenile joke after a meme coin, but actually reminding us of the Venetian Republic, a republic that survived many hundreds of years, but then declined.

And as part of that, he created this idea that DOGE would look into waste, fraud and abuse. But you know what, we already had people who were looking into waste, fraud, and abuse. In the Inspector General Act of 1978, Congress created the Offices of Inspector General in a number of different federal agencies, and what Congress said in that law was that these people were supposed to conduct and supervise audits and investigations relating to the programs and operations of the various departments, that they were to provide leadership and coordination and recommend policies designed to promote economy, efficiency, and effectiveness, and to prevent and detect fraud and abuse in those programs and operations.

So, we already had an organization that did what Donald Trump said he was trying to do. And one of the people who’s been most involved in the Inspector General community for decades is my guest today, Glenn Fine. Glenn is a lecturer here at Stanford, as well as a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown.

But before all that, he was an inspector general, and he was an inspector general twice. First as the Inspector General at the Department of Justice, and then as the Acting Inspector General at the Defense Department. He’s also the author of a wonderful book, Watchdogs: Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government.

I’m so glad you’re here with me today, Glenn, to talk about Inspectors General, and talk about where we find ourselves today.

Glenn Fine: Thanks for having me. A pleasure to talk with you.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, so Glenn, I read from the statute about what inspectors general do, but I wonder if you might tell us a little bit about sort of day to day the operations of your office when you were at DOJ, and then we can also talk about DOD and what the differences are.

Glenn Fine: Certainly. As you mentioned, there’s an inspector general in every federal agency whose mission is to detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse, and promote the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of the agency. We had a staff of auditors, evaluators and investigators who were able to look into any program or operation of the agency, and the agency—the Department of Justice, or the Department of Defense—had to cooperate with us.

We issued reports making recommendations for improvements. We did criminal investigations and administrative investigations of misconduct, and we tried to hold the agency accountable. There’s a group of inspectors general, an umbrella group called the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, and they tabulate all the potential savings from inspectors general from throughout the entire federal community, and it’s in the billions of dollars every year of potential savings, over a hundred billion dollars. So yes, there already are people within each agency to try and hold the agency accountable.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, one thing I did in getting ready for talking with you today is to look at the most recent semi-annual report to Congress from the DOJ Department of Justice Inspector General. They had issued 44 reports. They’d made 190 recommendations. They recovered $27 million. They had 31 convictions. They had a slew of disciplinary actions and that’s fairly typical for a six-month period, isn’t it?

Glenn Fine: It is very typical and it’s because the inspector general is within the agency and knows where the issues are and knows where the problematic areas are and has experience in detecting and deterring waste and abuse within the agency. So that’s not atypical. All the other large cabinet agencies have similar statistics and can help improve the agency operations.

Pam Karlan: Yeah. And I wonder if you might talk about a couple of the … in your book, you have a series of chapters describing different investigations that you did while you were at DOJ and also at DOD.

And there are two chapters that are right next to each other that illustrate, I think, the kind of range of stuff. One of them was about politicized hiring at the Department of Justice. And then the next one was about a really tragic episode at the Bureau of Prisons. I wonder if you might talk just a little bit about what you did in those investigations and what happened.

Glenn Fine: So, in the first one, politicized hirings and firings in the Justice Department, in the second term of the Bush administration, the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, removed a group of U.S. Attorneys without reasons why, and it created a significant backlash. He also had a group of officials who made judgments on hirings of career officials in the Department of Justice, the Summer Intern Program, the Honors Program, and used political measures or considerations for who to hire.

So, we were asked, along with the Office of Professional Responsibility, to look into that and found that they did use political judgments in the hiring for nonpolitical positions and had arbitrary and capricious reasons, without any rationale for the firings of the U.S. Attorneys, including some who may have been fired for political reasons. So…

Pam Karlan: And I should just stop you there for a second just remind our listeners because they may not know about that: those are civil service jobs that are supposed to be done through what’s called merit hiring, right?

Glenn Fine: The Honors Program and other career positions should be done through the civil service on merit principles, not for political reasons. U.S. Attorneys are hired and fired by the President, but normally once they’re hired, they should not be using political considerations in their decisions and that’s why it was problematic that the President removed a group of U.S. Attorneys without significant reasons why. And so we issued a report that explained that and resulted in changes in how the Department of Justice operated and they just said they would not use political considerations in the hirings for career officials and also made changes in how they were screened for those positions. So, we had an impact on how the department operated in that case.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, and I’ll just add in there that I worked in the front office of the Civil Rights Division in the next administration after the one that you issued the report on, and we were really careful, as a result of that report, to have all of the hiring done by the career people in the sections, and the only thing we did in the front office was essentially sign off on it, rather than us doing the interviewing of merit hires like Honors hires and like. The first time I spoke to any of the Honors hires was when I called to make them an offer.

Glenn Fine: Exactly, and that’s what the impact of an IG report can do. We can’t tell the department how to operate, but we can expose problems and make recommendations for improvement. We made that recommendation for improvement and the department accepted it. And that’s the way it has been for a significant period of time.

The second case you asked about was corruption in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. We had criminal investigators who investigated all sorts of criminal actions in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which is a vast organization. And the vast majority of correctional officers are honest and do a difficult job under difficult circumstances, but some are corrupt. They take bribes to introduce contraband. And some of them commit sexual assaults and sexual abuse of inmates under their custody. So, we … I explain a case, which was a tragic case where one of our investigators was killed in the line of fire. What happened was our investigators investigated a ring of corrupt prison officers in a prison in Tallahassee who were abusing female inmates, sexually abusing them, and threatening them with retaliation if they said anything about it. They did make a complaint. We investigated it, and along with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, six correctional officers in the prison were indicted for sexual abuse of inmates. When we, along with the FBI, went to arrest the correctional officers at the facility, two of them were arrested without incident.

The third, when he was being arrested, he pulled out a gun from his gym bag and started firing. He fired and shot a prison lieutenant, and then he went to shoot more people. One of our agents who was stationed at the door was shot and hit, fell down and then leaned back up, returned fire and killed the correctional officer.

But our agent also died as a result of his gunshot wound. So that shows the heroism and the challenge and the danger of IG law enforcement officers who try to prevent corruption and criminal conduct throughout the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, I want to back up a little now because you were talking about the importance of the non-politicized Justice Department, but the IG themselves is a non-politicized position or has been. Say a little bit about how you came to the job in the first place.

Glenn Fine: So I was a assistant United States Attorney as a prosecutor did that for a few years then went to a law firm, and worked at a law firm, and then decided I wanted to get back into government.

And a friend of mine introduced me to the Inspector General of the Justice Department at the time, Michael Bromwich. I had no idea what an Inspector General was. Many people don’t. They have been called some of the most important public servants you’ve never heard of. I hadn’t heard of them. But he explained to me what the IG did. They’re appointed by the President in the large cabinet agencies, confirmed by the Senate, but they are supposed to be nonpolitical. They are supposed to be selected without regard to their political affiliation and they’re supposed to be independent and objective units within the agency. So, I took the job with the Justice Department IG. I was head of the Special Investigations Unit for a while. Then when he left, I was recommended to be the IG and I was nominated and by the President and confirmed.

And since they are nonpolitical, they normally remain when the administration’s changed. So I was the Justice Department IG in the Clinton administration, in the two terms of the Bush administration, and also in the Obama administration, and that was fairly typical for IGs who remain because they are supposed to be non-political.

Pam Karlan: Yeah. And then you went into private practice for a while, but I guess the lure of the “IGdom” really had gotten into your blood. So talk a little bit about how you came to go to the Department of Defense.

Glenn Fine: So you’re right. I was in the Justice Department for 11 years. And after 11 years, I decided it was time for change. Change is good for an individual. Change is good for an organization. So I left and went into a law firm. And I enjoy the work of the law firm, but it didn’t have the same satisfaction and I wanted to get back into government. What can I say? I guess I’m a recidivist.

So, I was asked to go into the Department of Defense as the Principal Deputy Inspector General by the Inspector General at the time, who was interested in potentially leaving the job and having a deputy who could take over as an acting who was experienced. So, I took the job in 2015, he left soon thereafter, and then I became the Acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense in 2016.

Pam Karlan: So, the Department of Defense is a very different kind of agency than DOJ, and especially for a lawyer, I would think it seems like a very different kind of agency than DOJ. An agency that’s focused almost entirely just on law as the Department of Justice is. What were the differences in what you had to do when you were over at DOD as opposed to DOJ?

Glenn Fine: So, DOD is different. It has a different culture. On the other hand, being an IG is being an IG, so I had that advantage. But there are differences between the Department of Defense and Department of Justice, and I normally point to three differences. One is the size. The Department of Defense is the biggest government agency, perhaps the biggest organization in the world. It has a $800 billion budget. It has three million people if you count active duty, National Guard, civilians. It’s probably the largest organization in the world. Department of Justice pales in comparison in terms of size. So that’s the first difference.

The second difference is the focus. Department of Defense is focused internationally. The Department of Justice is mostly focused domestically but the Department of Defense is all around the world and you have to understand what’s happening all around the world, so I would read the newspaper differently. I would look at the international the foreign relations articles first, well… I would look at them, not first. I still looked at the sports page first, but after that I focused on international, because you had to understand foreign relations in the Department of Defense much more so than in the Department of Justice.

And the third difference: the number of acronyms. There are so many acronyms in the Department of Defense. Everything is turned into an acronym. At one point, I said to one of my staff, who was a former military veteran, “Why do they use so many acronyms at the Department of Defense?” And he said “We’re very BGOA here. “I say, “BGOA? What does that mean?” He said, “Very Big on Acronyms.” So you had to learn, you had to learn the language.

It’s a different language, but eventually you did. And I was very impressed with the culture of the Department of Defense. It had tremendous experience, tremendous talent, and a very, obviously, critical mission.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, and what kinds of investigations did you do at DOD?

Glenn Fine: They were similar investigations. We had audits and evaluations and criminal investigations. So, we investigated price gouging in Pentagon procurement contracts. We did audits of the financial statements of the Department of Defense, and they’ve never received a clean opinion in their financial statements. And we did, for example, an investigation of the worst corruption scandal in Navy history, what the so called Fat Leonard case. A person who was known as Fat Leonard had a ship servicing business in the Pacific, in which he serviced Navy ships and port, but he corrupted so many Navy officers and he would get information from them, he would get information on their competitors, and they would overlook his overbilling because he had provided them gifts and lavish dinners and tickets and cash and prostitutes, and he corrupted and involved a vast number of officers in the Navy in the Pacific, and it was really a challenging investigation. Eventually he was arrested and started cooperating and cooperated against several Navy officers who were convicted of corruption.

Pam Karlan: And to do that kind of investigation, you need people with a whole bunch of different kinds of talents. On the one hand, you need people who have the ability to read balance sheets and understand what’s going on there. You have to have people who have the ability to get witnesses to talk and cooperate. You couldn’t do that by simply having two 19-year-olds with, some control over AI, doing searches of emails, right?

Glenn Fine: No, you have to understand how the Navy operates, you have to understand the evidence and you have to do hard work of looking at the documents and interviewing witnesses and eventually search warrants. We had what was called the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, which is the criminal investigative arm of the Department of Defense Inspector General’s Office. And no one’s really heard of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. They’ve heard of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

Pam Karlan: Because… That’s because they have a show.

Glenn Fine: They have a show. Actually, the story may be apocryphal is when they were thinking of doing the show, they came to the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and said, we’d like to do a show and we’d like to call it DCIS, Defense Criminal Investigative Service.

And the IG at the time, many years ago said, “No, we don’t want that, we don’t want the publicity.” And then they went to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and said, “We’d like to do a show. We’d like to call it NCIS, Naval Criminal Investigative Service” and the head of the service said, “Yeah, we’ll do that, that sounds great.” And so now everybody knows NCIS, but doesn’t know DCIS. But you’re right, the point is, it’s a lot of legwork. It’s hard work. You can’t just look at a database. You have to really get involved in the documents and the witnesses and the interviews to determine where the fraud is.

Pam Karlan: One of the things, in part, because you had experience in two of the major agencies, and you were asked to coordinate some investigation and evaluation after COVID, right?

Glenn Fine: Yes, we all remember where we were when COVID hit, mostly in March of 2020. And Congress … the economy shut down, Congress appropriated $2 trillion in COVID relief funds, but they also created what was called a Pandemic Relief Accountability Committee (PRAC), and it was composed of IGs from many different federal agencies to look for and oversee those trillions of dollars in funds and look for waste, fraud, abuse in those funds. And by the statute, one IG had to be selected to be the chair of the PRAC. Unfortunately, I drew the short straw and was selected by my fellow IGs to be the chair.

It was announced on a Monday, and within a week the President replaced me—President Trump replaced me as the acting IG of the Department of Defense. And so I was no longer the head of the Department of Defense IG’s office, and so I could no longer be on the PRAC, so I could no longer be the chair, and that was the end of my tenure as the PRAC and as the acting IG of the Department of Defense.

Pam Karlan: Inspectors general have been back in the news recently because one of President Trump’s first acts when he came back into office was to fire, I think it was 17 of the inspectors general. And I guess maybe the place to start here is there’s actually law on what the President can or can’t do in removing an inspector general, right?

Glenn Fine: That’s correct. The Inspector General Act does allow the President to remove an inspector general, but has a process. He’s supposed to give Congress 30 days’ notice before the removal, and in an amendment to the IG Act that was passed in a bipartisan way in 2022, he’s supposed to give a substantive rationale with detailed and case-specific reasons for the removal. If the President wants to immediately remove the IG, he can if he meets certain criteria, if it meets certain criteria, like the IG would be a threat in the workplace, but the President did not follow those provisions of the IJ Act and removed the IGs, 17 of them, you’re right virtually all of them, there were a few remaining, and there were he removed them immediately.

So he didn’t follow the notice requirements of the Inspector General Act when he did these, this massive…

Pam Karlan: Yeah, and then there was one of the inspectors general, I think it was the Inspector General of USAID that he didn’t remove immediately, but a few days after that, the inspector general issued a report that said there was, I think, $489 million worth of food aid in countries that receive food aid, that was likely to rot on the docks. He fired that inspector general.

Glenn Fine: That’s right. In the initial firings, he removed almost all of them. He did not remove a few, including the USAID IG. It wasn’t clear why because the people who….

Pam Karlan: He might not have even known we had USAID at that point.

Glenn Fine: Perhaps. Perhaps. But he … because they found out because in two weeks, a few weeks later, the Inspector General of USAID, Paul Martin, issued a very critical report as you mentioned, saying that millions of dollars of food of USAID aid was in danger of spoilage or diversion on the docks where they were being delivered because of cutbacks in USAID.

When he issued that report, the next day he was removed. And in fact, in the notice when he was removed, the initial removals were done by a terse email from somebody in the Office of Presidential Personnel who said, “because of changing priorities, we’re removing you.” When they removed the USAID IG after the, that critical report, didn’t even say changing priorities, so imagine that the chilling effect of that.

If you issue a critical report and get removed the next day, that has to have a chilling effect on the remaining people in the IG’s office.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, so in the 2022 amendments, which require the notice to Congress and like, why did Congress care so much about making sure that they knew ahead of time if a president was going to fire, remove an IG?

Glenn Fine: I think the rationale is to require a reason so that if Congress wants to try and persuade the President not to remove the IG or to argue against it, they have an opportunity to do that. It didn’t prevent the President from removing the IG, but it allowed an opportunity for persuasion and argument about that and even that wasn’t even followed.

Pam Karlan: Yeah it’s one of these things, I have this feeling in seeing what, President Trump did there that it would have been so easy for him to remove these folks consistent with the law by giving the notice to Congress and explaining what the change in priorities is and the like, and the fact that he decided not to do that, at least to me, seems pretty telling indication that he just wants to show he’s not going to be hamstrung by the law in doing what he wants, because this is not like, for example, removing the people at the NLRB where arguably they have legal protection against being removed at all, or removing Hampton Dellinger, who’s head of the Office of Special Counsel, where it says you can really only remove him for not performing his job properly.

Glenn Fine: That’s right. There’s not …. it’s not a just cause removal provision as in other independent agencies, but I think it’s part of a pattern of the president and the administration with this unitary executive theory where they have the power to control everything within the executive branch, and vestiges of independence, such as IGs or other places, are not consistent with that theory.

I think that they are not accepting the constitutionality of these removal provisions, even the notice provision in the IG Act. And I think that may be the reason why they want to test the theory, and as a result, there has been a lawsuit filed by some of the fired IGs and it’s working its way through the courts right now. And I think that’s part of the reason why that the president doesn’t believe he has to follow these restrictions on his removal authority.

Pam Karlan: We talked a little bit about a report you did on politicized hiring and firing. And I wonder if we could…. looking forward, with this administration and what it’s already done with IGs, do you think inspectors general, or even the Offices of Inspectors General, I guess I should say, because they would all now have acting Inspectors General at most, are they going to be capable of doing the kind of investigation that you did in your job, in your position as DOJ Inspector General?

Glenn Fine: I think they’re capable of it. They have good people in the office, they have actings who are normally the deputy, like the first assistant within the office or another high-level official within the office. So yes, they have good people there. My concern is if the office has become politicized and they change with every administration and if you are removed when you issue a report that’s critical of the agency, it does undermine the independence and the willingness, I think, of some people in the IG’s office to criticize the current administration, and that’s the danger with politicization of these jobs.

I think that’s the reason why they wanted them to be independent and nonpartisan, and why Congress wanted them to normally remain when the administrations change. They’re capable of it, but it does have a chilling effect when IGs are removed and become almost political appointees like any others.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, I thought that was one of the interesting things in your book is you talk at a number of places about different attorneys general that you talk to and people at the Department of Defense, and they all wanted your honest opinion of what was going on. And that seems to me to be central to the ability of IGs to perform their jobs correctly.

Glenn Fine: I think that’s right. An IG can’t force management to make any changes, they just make recommendations. It’s the force of their recommendation. It’s up to management, the heads of the agencies and other officials to make those changes. But I was very fortunate because everyone I worked for, five … worked with really … five attorneys general, four secretaries of defense or acting secretaries, they appreciated the work. They didn’t always love it, but they realized that by bringing problems to their attention, by making recommendations for improvement, we were helping the operations of the agency.

And that was the way they should look at it, because while IGs can make it difficult in the short run, and expose some embarrassing situations in the short run, in the long run, through independent hard-hitting oversight, you make the operation better, and you detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse. There is waste, fraud, and abuse in government. There’s no question about it. That’s not … that shouldn’t be a partisan issue, and IGs are one of the critical components that pointed out and make recommendations to, to improve it. And so rather than make them political or remove them if there’s a hard-hitting report, they should be encouraged. They shouldn’t be isolated. They should be empowered.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, it’s telling that the foreword to your book was written by a former Secretary of Defense, General Jim Mattis.

Glenn Fine: Yeah, he would always say, I can’t improve things unless you bring problems to my attention. He would say that to his staff. He would say that to the IG.

There was an Attorney General Ashcroft in the Department of Justice. He was in favor of continuous improvement, and we issued some very critical reports during his tenure as the Attorney General. But he always accepted the role of the IG and he … actually, he would compare—and he said this to his senior staff, he would compare the IG and getting an IG audit or investigation like going to the dentist. He would say, it’s painful when you’re in the dentist’s chair, but you come out more healthy, same with an IG audit or investigation. And that’s the attitude you want and that’s … I was fortunate to have leaders of the organizations that I work with have that attitude.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, our listeners obviously can’t see us, but I’m smiling now with my recently cleaned teeth at that at that analogy. I want to thank you so much, Glenn, for coming onto the show. So thanks to our guest, Glenn Fine. The former Inspector General of the Department of Justice, Acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense, and author of Watchdogs.

This is Stanford Legal. If you’re enjoying the show, please tell a friend and leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Your feedback improves the show and helps new listeners to discover us. I’m Pam Karlan. See you next time.