Seven oh five, here a fifty five krc DE talk station. Happy Tuesday one time's right here. Glad to be hosted for fifty five Carcy Mornings. So especial when a guy like Todd Zinser is in studio to talk about what's going on in Washington, d C. Spent a lot of time there because Todd was an inspector generally. He was in DC for thirty one years conducting audits and investigations
of federal officials programs and operations. And he penned an op ed piece to the Cincinni Inquirer of the new igs and Doge should collaborate Todd, It's always great to have you in studio, my friend. Thank you, Brian, Good morning, Good morning. Let's start with, you know, ten thousand foot view. What do before we get to the idea of Donald Trump firing them? What do inspector generals do? What are they tasked with? What are their day to day responsibilities?
Right? The Inspectors General are based on a nineteen seventy eight law called the ig Act of nineteen seventy eight. It's been amended a couple of times, but it basically puts Inspectors general in each of the department or cabinet departments and numerous other agencies. And it basically has two sides. They have an investigative side and they have an audit side. An audit is very expansive. It's it security audits, contract audits,
grant audits, financial statement audits. They do the whole thing, and on investigations. They do investigations of fraud against the government, criminal cases, and they also do administrative cases involving misconduct and other rule violations and things like that. They operate a hotline for fraud, waste and abuse reports, and they have a dual reporting requirement. They report to both the Secretary of the Department. They have a reporting obligation to Congress.
So they're like stuck in the middle. And in years past they've been described as straddling a barbed wire fence. So there are i think right now, seventy four Inspectors General. Back in nineteen seventy eight, I think it started with a dozen, and it's just expanded. And there are igs that are appointed by the president and there are igs that are appointed by the head of their independent agency.
So the igs that Trump removed, it's called removal in the federal government not firing, but the ones that he removed are all from most For the most part, they're from the cabinet departments. There's only two cabinet departments that were not affected. Two IGS and cabinet departments that were not affected. One was Justice Michael Horowitz and the other was the IG at the Department of Homeland Security, who is currently doing cases or investigations of the Secret Service
and what happened with the assassination attempts. So those are the only two. All the other igs removed came from cabinet departments. There are a couple of agencies, like the IG for Afghan Reconstruction, I guess was removed for some reason. He was actually a good IG. But the focus is on the departments.
Now this I guess what I consider. And you know, pick a department, and I don't think you can find a single department in the federal government that hasn't been accused of or allowed fraud, waste, and abuse to occur under its watch. I mean Medicare, Medicaid, social Security, the PPP loan program. We go down the entire list of any government program. People are constantly committing acts of fraud, and billions and billions of dollars could be saved if
that was ferreted out. So that that has happened and continues to happen over I would argue deck aids that failure lies in the lapse of the IGS.
Then, well, to a certain extent it does. They have to I mean they have to have a good program in place to identify their risks in the department. They look at programs and say, what are the risks in these departments that is going to be defrauded and they're supposed to identify that and report those And the fact is that the programs are set up in such a way that they're easy to defraud. Yeah, and there's not a whole lot the IG can do across the board
like that. But if they have a case, or if they have an audit that they perform, they're going to make a recommendation for improvements. And they're not the most well funded agencies in the federal government.
I can tell you that well, I can understand that, But I mean therein lies the challenge. If billions of dollars are being misspent or stolen, I can make the argument then it will be a great allocation of resources to improve the funding to allow the its to actually be able to do their job and ferret out this waste and abuse and fraud.
Right and and not to be too cynical, but like, I'll go ahead, there's been there's been special Inspectors General set up for various reasons, like Pandemic Relief, the Recovery Act. They set up special igs to focus on those areas. And when they do that, Congress is able to say, well, we put an IG in place, so we have fixed
that problem. The IG is on the case when it's really kind of just window dressing in a lot of cases, Oh exactly, they put an IG in place, but they don't give the IG all the resources here or she needs so.
Or as you put it out a moment ago. Congress is the ones who is the one who created the program or passed the law that's being followed in its implementation. But the law itself has so many giant holes in it that allow this easy fraud to occur. They don't go back and fix the problem that they started with this, you know, a poorly written law.
Right, like the the pandemic relief programs, like the people PPP, the pandemic relief has been defrauded by hundreds of billions of dollars. Yeah, so in situations like that, there are some things the igs can do, but not much really.
Oh all right, well, sorry conclusion on that from Todd Zenzer, But he was in this role and he knows what he's talking about. Is there any argument that these now fired igs can make that they're allowed to keep their job? I know there's been a tradition of presidents keeping in place and this is the subject matter of your op ed piece. New igs and doges should collaborate, Obviously. Donald
Trump's wants is a new sheriff in town. He wants his own people there, people who are aligned with his message about ferreting out fraud, waste, and abuse and cutting the size and the scope of government. So I get his motivation, But do they have any claim to the job that they have been removed from? Right?
Well, back in two thousand and eight, Congress was trying to put some kind of protection in place for the igs, and the original idea was to establish some kind of four cause standard for igs that they couldn't be fired at will. The president would have to establish some cause to fire them. Well, that never happened, and instead, oh, they compromised and put this reporting requirement in place that the president had to give Congress thirty days. Notice why,
I don't really know. I never understood what was supposed to happen in those thirty days, except maybe give the IG a couple more paychecks or give Congress time to build a big frenzy around it. But it really has no purpose. And I think that Trump ignored that requirement on purpose, on purpose because they don't think it's constitutional.
Yeah, I can see that that.
It interferes with the president's authority to hire and fire. Yeah, so I think they just ignored it. There is a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Board, the thing that Elizabeth Warren set up. They set that up completely outside of the president's authority and Congress's authority. That is funded by the Federal Reserve, and there is a fork. They tried to put a four cause provision in there, and that failed. Somebody sued them, and that no longer exists.
So they are now also under the authority of the president. But the authority of the president to hire and fire is pretty fundamental. Well, I would say, I mean, it's his administration, and he the nation would well served if a bunch of IGS are out there undermining the administration's
aims and goals. Well, the other thing that goes on, and it goes on under the radar, is back in twenty twenty, I did a presentation for a group about the IGS, and I went and looked at headlines in the paper trying to figure out what the IGS were up to, and article headline after headline after headline where all of these reports about Democrats asking igs to investigate
the Trump administration for one reason or another. You know, for example, one of them was they wanted the Treasury IG to investigate why the Harriet Tubman twenty dollars bill was being delayed. I mean, that's that's the kind of thing that Congress just tries to harass the Trump administration back in twenty twenty at least. And I don't think Trump wants to put up with that either. So he's can imagine he's going to put his people in place that will tell Congress, you know, we're not going to
do that. Plus he disrupts the relationship between the incumbent IGS and Congress. You build a relationship with people in Congress, congressmen and staff. Well, he's disrupted all of that with these removals.
Let's pause. We'll bring Todd back and find out do Inspectors General have to listen to folks in Congress badgering them to investigate the president himself. Let's find out what leverage they have with Todd Zen's or former Inspector General himself. First word for Pressedisionterriers. You want a kitchen remodel project done right? You want pressedision Terriers. That is John Ryan
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Fifty about KRCV talk station, Happy Tuesday. Todd's ins are consider at city. He knows what he's talking about because he was an inspector general, had to live in Washington, d C. And he served his various different inspectors General. I guess firing these inspectors centers makes all the sense in the world, and he todd. As you've talked about and as I asked you, given the scope of any of these departments over which they set, getting a handle on the job in and of itself has got to
be a long term proposition. I mean the size of like the Medicare program or Social Security or Commerce, as you just mentioned to me when you were when you get centered to Commerce, like I really didn't even know what commerce is all about. So I learned the.
Job right well. The the transition between igs goes on and you have to rely on your You have to rely on the staff there that they're still They've got their audits planned and they're conducting their audits, and the investigative side is doing their investigations. That the challenge is to understand from the department's perspective what's going on, and meeting with the heads of the departments, meeting with the people in the departments that are really carrying out the programs.
You got to get out and you have to do that kind of groundwork to really understand what the issues are in the department. When I got to Commerce, I went around to each departments and spoke to the leadership. And here's an example. I went to the Patent Office right and talked about their challenges, and the big challenge
for them was how long what their backlog was. There's thousands, hundreds of thousands of patent applications in a backlog, and I said, well, isn't the goal to reduce the backlog to like zero or close to zero. Well, no, they can't do that because if it gets too low, then they don't have enough work for their patent examiners. So it's like you run into things like that. They really don't really don't make sense.
That doesn't make any sense.
It does.
Well, it's just an illustration of the stupidity of government, you know. Because they do not have to earn to keep themselves alive and to float like any other business. They live off stealing money from us. They've got no incentive to do their job. In order to keep the job, they've dragged their feet.
We did one case at the Patent Office where they hired all these paralegals because they were going to hire a bunch of additional patent judges. So they hired all these paralegals, but they never got around to hiring the judges. So these paralegals worked from home and did nothing, and somebody finally got a guilty conscience that called the IG's office and said, hey, we're sitting around getting paid to do nothing. And they wasted millions and millions of dollars.
And what was crazy is they all got above average performance appraisals and they got performance bonuses. Oh so things like that happen.
You know, you say it and you just wish it wasn't true, But in so many levels, it just doesn't surprise me at all.
Yeah, well, it's a big The federal government is huge.
It's too big people.
People don't really appreciate how huge it is.
Well, going back to the idea that Congress can pester one or other inspectors general to look into and investigate, like say the president of the United States of America, which has happened under Trump administration. Do the inspector general say, Can they turn around and say, no, that's not my job. I'm over the Commerce Department. I don't have anything to investigate about Trump or fill in the black president. Right.
Well, one of the big controversies that the IG investigated under Trump was when a Hurricane Dorian occurred and there was all kinds of destruction. Trump had actually predicted that the hurricanes path was going to be different than what the Weather Service had predicted, and he used the little marker to mark up their math. Yeah. Well, the IG was requested to investigate all that, and it's like, why, what's the big deal?
So that's the find out if Donald Trump's clairvoyant. Yeah, so I demanded an answer. So that's the kind of stuff that can go on, and it did. It did go on with the Democrats when Trump came in. They were sending all kinds of requests to the igs all over the government. Well, you didn't restore my confidence in the government, todd Sensor, just putting an exclamation point on everything that we were fearing and worrying about. It's all true, folks, It's a lot worse than you and I ever imagine.
Please Dear God, new sheriff in town lot, Donald Trump and the DOGE team and everybody else, These new Inspector General stick to the task of their job and fared out the fraud wasted abuse on behalf of the American taxpayer. Do you have any optimism that that might happen time?
Well, what I'm optimistic for is that a lot of this is being done with these removals clear the path for the IGS to align their YEAH resources and operations with the Department of Government Efficiency the government that DOGE has put teams in each department, but it's very small teams.
And if they could align with the IG and instead of thinking of it as they want to prevent the IGS from doing work, they need to view it as they want the IGS to do specific, exactly targeted work that will support what DOOSE just trying to do.
Well.
Hopefully that can happen. And let's face it, man, there is a ton of low hanging fruit out there that they could get rid of right away. Todd, you always have a welcome spot here in the fifty five KRC Morning Show. Appreciate your being able to tap into your knowledge and expertise in these areas, and we'll look forward to having you on the show again real soon seven twenty six. Right now, folks, if you have KRCD talk stations, Zimmer Heating and air Conditioning, Yeah, get in touch with them.
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