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Obama has fired 2 IGs in 2 weeks, leashed another
By Ed Morrissey
HotAir.com
The firing of Gerald Walpin as Inspector General was not an isolated
incident, as the
Chicago Tribune reports today. Two more IGs have been dismissed in the past
two weeks, and Senator Charles Grassley has started demanding answers. The
sudden push to rid the government of independent watchdogs appears to coincide
with Barack Obama’s plans to use government spending to get control over more
aspects of American life, such as with stimulus spending, the financial sector,
and volunteer organizations (via
Dan Riehl):
He was appointed with fanfare as the public watchdog over the government’s
multi-billion dollar bailout of the nation’s financial system. But now Neil
Barofsky is embroiled in a dispute with the Obama administration that delayed
one recent inquiry and sparked questions about his ability to freely
investigate.
The disagreement stems from a claim by the Treasury Department that
Barofsky is not entirely independent of the agency he is assigned to examine —
a claim that has prompted a stern letter from a Republican senator warning
that agency officials are encroaching on the integrity of an office created to
protect taxpayers. …
The dispute comes as Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance
Committee, is looking into the abrupt firings within the last week of two
other inspectors general ¿ one of whom was fired by the White House and the
other by the chair of the International Trade Commission.
Both inspectors general had investigated sensitive subjects at the time of
their firings.
Grassley is now concerned about whether a pattern is emerging in which the
independence of the government’s top watchdogs — whose jobs were authorized by
Congress to look out for waste, fraud and abuse — is being put at risk.
The positions themselves indicate where the White House wants to go with its
efforts. Barofsky
ruffled feathers in April when his watchdog report showed that the Obama
administration had placed insufficient safeguards on Porkulus spending. This
later
caused Joe Biden to shrug and tell the media, “Some people are being scammed
already,” as if it wasn’t the job of the administration to stop it from
happening. Barofsky now has a leash around his neck, with the White House
insisting that he answers only to Treasury.
We’ve already covered the case of Gerald Walpin, whose work brought him into
conflict with Obama crony Kevin Johnson, now the mayor of Sacramento. The White
House and Johnson claim that there is no connection between the two, but this
video from Naked Emperor News tells another story:
Walpin stands between the White House and their desire to use AmeriCorps as a
reward system for their political allies and to use government money for the
kind of “community organizing” that put Obama in the White House. His report to
Congress made that difficult in Sacramento, where Mayor Johnson had been blocked
from receiving federal grant money for his admitted earlier fraud. Walpin’s
independence had to be removed, and in this case, Walpin had to be smeared to
make it stick.
The third incident came last week at the International Trade Commission,
where Judith Gwynne worked independent of the White House, and which will be a
critical position as Obama reshapes trade arrangements around the world. An ITC
employee earlier this year “forcibly removed” paperwork from Gwynne. Rather than
back the IG after Grassley wrote a letter demanding answers, the political
appointees at the ITC dumped her.
We are seeing a pattern, no longer just a single data point. IGs work
independently to protect taxpayers from corruption and abuse from its own
government agencies. A coordinated attack on IGs certainly suggests hostility to
that mission, which isn’t the Hope and Change Obama promised on the campaign
trail.
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