Obama's IG Scandals Deepen: House Opens Investigation
Former St. Louis Detective Patrick McFarland must have been surprised the day he discovered his budget for operations as Inspector General of the US Office of Personnel Management would be reduced by President Barack Obama, who continues to promise a new era of transparency in government.
Ultimately, the dirty job of trying to promote clean and effective government falls on the shoulders of the Inspector General. Each major division of the US bureaucracy is assigned an independent office to guard against waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement. McFarland has performed this function for the OPM for 22 years, under 4 presidents. According to Ed Towns and Stephen Lynch of the House Oversight Committee, The IG Act provides that: "any comments of [an] affected Inspector General" shall be included in the budget of the United States Government submitted to Congress if the Inspector General concludes that the budget would "substantially inhibit" him from performing his duties.and...
IG McFarland alleges that OPM received a "not so veiled threat from OMB" that if the IG exercised its statutory authority to advise Congress that the proposed budget was inadequate, OMB "will make life miserable" for the OPM IG.The complaint was received by Stephen Lynch, who chairs the subcommittee for oversight of employees of the Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia. He is joined by committee chair Towns in a formal request for an investigation by Obama's budget director, Peter Orzag. (linked above). When the Inspector General Reform Act was passed in 2008, it was a major victory for Democrats who wanted to insure the budgetary independence of IGs, because the very people they investigate have recently cut their budget as retaliation in recent years. Edolphus Towns, a long established Democrat from Brooklyn intends to protect this victory, and expects an answer from Orzag by January 22nd. The press release from Towns and Lynch follows:
The original complaint from IG McFarland follow below as a pdf., and here's a link to his official government website.
David Roknich |
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