Elected officials should be held accountable for what they say, how they vote, what they do, and what they fail to do.
Additionally, the money spent by government should be accounted for, with online reports of purchases and expenditures, bolstered by audits and reviews that ensure public money has been spent efficiently and for the intended purposes.
These days, federal officials are working hard to see that doesn’t happen.
One huge example is the oversight provisions in the $2.2 trillion relief package that Congress pushed through in late March.
President Donald Trump has made clear that he thinks he can spend the money as he wants. In a White House statement March 27, he announced that he rejected the law’s provision calling for oversight by the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.
To make his point clear, he fired Glenn Fine, the inspector general of the Pentagon, who had been tapped to lead the oversight committee.
Trump claimed Fine was too partisan. FactCheck.org reports that Fine had worked eight years in Republican President George Bush’s administration, as well as in the administrations of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Here’s how Trump’s former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis described Fine: “Mr. Fine is a public servant in the finest tradition of honest, competent governance,” he wrote in an email to Yahoo News. “In my years of extensive engagement with him as our Department of Defense’s acting Inspector General, he proved to be a leader whose personal and managerial integrity were always of the highest order.”
That likely was the real problem Trump had with Fine.
About the same time Trump fired Fine, he also fired Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general.
Trump said he fired Atkinson because he was “a disgrace” and that he had no confidence in him.
The president’s assessment stems from Atkinson’s handling of a whistleblower complaint regarding Trump’s decision to halt aid to Ukraine and evidence that the decision was tied to efforts Trump made to get Ukraine’s top leaders to launch a criminal investigation into Trump’s political rival Joe Biden.
Trump claims the whistleblower’s account was inaccurate and that Atkinson should have buried it. A U.S. House investigation, led by Democrats, found that the whistleblower’s account was accurate and was sufficient reason to impeach the president.
The Senate, led by Republicans, shrugged, then dismissed the entire scandal without calling any witnesses.
Among most Republicans in Congress, the firings of inspectors general have received the same lackadaisical response.
