Members of the National Guard fill cars with take-away meals in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
A council of inspectors general that went dark after President Donald Trump removed the top coronavirus relief watchdog earlier this month resurfaced Monday, naming a top staffer to oversee the government’s pandemic response and launching a website that will catalog the IGs’ efforts.
The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, a panel of two dozen federal inspectors general charged with coordinating work to investigate the coronavirus relief effort, named Robert Westbrooks, a veteran inspector general, as its executive director on Monday. Westbrooks, a certified public accountant and an attorney, and the inspector general of a massive federal retirement benefit program, has held senior watchdog positions at the Small Business Administration, Department of Transportation, U.S. Postal Service and National Archives.
“I look forward to working with the entire oversight community — federal, state, and local — to coordinate and conduct independent oversight over these critically important emergency relief programs, and help ensure that funds are used effectively and efficiently and major program risks are addressed,” Westbrooks said in a statement.
Under the $2 trillion CARES Act, passed last month to begin stanching the economic hemorrhaging caused by the pandemic and to provide relief to struggling businesses, lawmakers established the panel of inspectors general as a broad and powerful overseer of the massive rescue effort. The law empowered an existing committee of inspectors general, chaired by Justice Department Watchdog Michael Horowitz, to select the chairman of the new pandemic panel and determine which of his colleagues would sit on the new committee. Horowitz selected nearly two dozen inspectors general to sit on the committee and named Pentagon acting inspector general Glenn Fine to lead it.
But Trump threw the panel into turmoil earlier this month when he demoted Fine, making him ineligible to lead the coronavirus oversight effort. Horowitz has yet to name a successor for Fine, and he’s recently sparred with Trump over other incursions into the inspector general community, as Trump has moved against officials empowered to oversee his administration’s coronavirus response. The work of the pandemic panel, though, had gone quiet since Trump removed Fine from the top spot. The members showed Monday, though, that their work has continued — and that Horowitz has taken on the role of “acting chair.”
In addition to naming Westbrooks, the inspectors general launched a website that catalogues their ongoing reviews of the federal coronavirus response. The site also breaks down the intended recipients of trillions of dollars in federal spending that Congress provided to address the crisis.
The site also includes an option for members of the public and federal workforce to submit allegations of waste, fraud, abuse or retaliation against whistleblowers; a feedback form about the government’s pandemic response; and a clearinghouse for all U.S. attorney statements and filings related to the pandemic.
Federal watchdogs name top staffer to oversee pandemic response
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