How inspectors general protect taxpayers, government integrity

Thirty years ago, I worked for an ambassador - a political appointee from the business world - who one night entertained a group of high-level contacts at an upscale restaurant.

The ambassador, perhaps trying to be gracious, said to the most senior contact at the table, "I don't know that much about local wines, why don't you choose?" Several $300 bottles of cabernet later, the ambassador's representational budget was in a shambles.

The next morning the ambassador dropped the receipts on the Administrative Officer's desk and said: "fix it." There was only one fix. The ambassador was reimbursed the amount allowed under State Department rules and the rest was out-of-pocket. Perhaps the ambassador bought a good book on wine after that.

The Administrative Officer would have been risking his career or at least promotion if he had tried to fudge the expense account. Eventually, the regular inspections by the Office of Inspector General would have raised red flags.

Over last weekend, President Donald Trump fired the State Department's Inspector General Steve Linick, who had been in the position for five years. Linick was replaced by a senior diplomat known to be loyal to Vice President Mike Pence. In his letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the president said he had lost confidence in Linick, but on Monday, in response to reporters' questions, he said he did not know Linick and had never heard of him, but agreed to the sacking at the behest of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Linick was the fourth inspector general fired by the president in recent weeks, including the IGs for the intelligence community and the office charged with overseeing the spending of several trillion dollars in COVID-19 aid under the CARES Act.

Members of the House have suggested that Linick had opened investigations into actions by Pompeo both large and small. The large was the declaration by Pompeo that an "emergency" caused by Iranian conduct in the Middle East allowed the State Department to make an end run around a congressionally mandated suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and to fast track $8.1 billion in arms sales after some heavy lobbying by American defense contractors.

The small was the allegation that the secretary of state had used a Schedule C employee - i.e., a lower-level political appointee immune from the competitive civil service hiring process - to do personal errands like dog walking or the fetching of dry cleaning. In essence, the allegation was that U.S. taxpayers were footing the bill for Secretary Pompeo's gofer.

President Trump, cavalier as ever, said Monday he did not have any problem with such small violations of the rules as dog walking. After all, the secretary was busy negotiating "war and peace." As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, "the rich are very different from you and me." There seems to be an expectation that some rules are for the little people.

Many of the rules that federal employees operate under are indeed burdensome and, sometimes, too complicated, but they are designed by the Congress and the executive branch to try to assure that the trillions of taxpayer dollars that flow through government accounts are spent for the purpose for which they were intended and that excesses, like $300 bottles of cabernet or the flaunting of contracting regulations, are prevented. As a whole, these regulations create a culture that reminds federal employees every day that they are spending the taxpayer's money.

Are there abuses? Of course. The government is run by human beings. Politics, incompetence, greed and outright criminality occur. That is why the rules and the systems of oversight exist. Removing an inspector general in such a shameless manner, as if one is scraping gum off the bottom of one's shoe, sends the message that rules and oversight are just for suckers.

Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.