Who’s Watching the Watchdogs? House Demands Answers After Scathing Audit of Inspectors General

Congress is demanding answers after a review found that inspectors general—the federal officials charged with weeding out agency waste and fraud—are failing to police their own.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is asking the body with oversight of inspectors general across multiple agencies, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), to provide additional documents after the Government Accountability Office found that the council missed deadlines in completing investigations, discarded complaints that should be investigated, and failed to properly monitor potential conflicts of interest.

The Daily Signal reported in June 2024 on allegations that the CIGIE Integrity Committee—an unelected body—was selectively investigating complaints against Trump-appointed Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari. This came after Cuffari issued numerous reports citing problems with the Biden administration’s border security policies.

In September 2024, the House Oversight Committee sought a GAO investigation into the matter.

Last week, House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., along with subcommittee chairmen Reps. Pete Sessions, R-Texas; Clay Higgins, R-La.; and Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., signed a letter to CIGIE Chairwoman Cheryl Mason, also the inspector general for the Department of Veterans Affairs, seeking more information and documents.

“The issues identified raise serious questions about CIGIE’s ability to effectively conduct investigations into misconduct and wrongdoing within offices of inspectors general,” the lawmakers wrote. “The committee demands that CIGIE take immediate action to rectify these failures and is seeking documents and information to help determine the best legislative solutions to remedy concerns with CIGIE’s Integrity Committee.”

The committee gave a July 15 deadline to provide documents that include a list of the actions the inspectors general council took to address the GAO findings, communications between the council’s staff and the Integrity Committee staff, and a plan of action to address the findings in the GAO report.

As of Tuesday, the council has acknowledged receipt of the letter from the House, but has not yet responded.

“These systemic failures force the committee to consider all options at its disposal, including removing or modifying the duty to investigate wrongdoing within offices of inspectors general from CIGIE,” House Republicans later added in the letter to Mason. “While the committee reviews potential changes to remedy these failures, it is imperative that CIGIE immediately improve its investigation processes to address the issues found by GAO.”

The GAO report found that the council regularly missed the 150-day statutory deadline for completing an investigation, and that the minimum length for an investigation was 427 days, while the maximum was three years. It found just 24% of cases met all timeframe requirements.

The report, released to the public in June, further faulted the Integrity Committee for “improper reviews that could discard complaints” that should be investigated.

The GAO also noted that final investigative reports sometimes “did not reflect the conclusions reached by the investigating office of inspector general.”

“Additionally, the IC did not always document required information in case summaries, including recusals of members with conflicts of interest,” the GAO report says.

The report later makes eight recommendations that include “adhering to policy on conducting secondary reviews of potentially frivolous complaints; strengthening policies to enhance compliance with required time frames and documentation; improving statutorily required reporting to Congress; and providing full explanations for IC investigative conclusions that conflict with conclusions reached by assisting OIGs.”

A CIGIE spokesperson did not respond to the Daily Signal for this story.

Mason, the CIGIE chairwoman and a Donald Trump appointee at the Department of Veterans Affairs, wrote in response to a draft report that the committee agrees with the recommendations.

“The IG community remains willing and open to discussing these challenges along with possible solutions or reforms with our congressional stakeholders,” Mason wrote to the GAO in response to the draft. Her letter was included in the final report. “CIGIE concurs in principle with all eight of the recommendations made by the GAO and provides suggestions for corrective actions for each.”

She added, “A central limit is that the IC as currently construed does not conduct its own investigations and relies on assisting OIGs, each of which has its own resource constraints and competing priorities.”