Political Quotes

“In recent months, a lot of attention has focused on the Nation's inspectors general. It seems like a good idea to take a few minutes now to remember what inspectors general are, why Congress created them in the first place, and how we got here. Congress first established offices of inspectors general in 1978 ``to create independent and objective units'' in the Federal Government to do three things: conduct audits and investigations; No. 2, promote efficiency and determine fraud and abuse; and No. 3, keep agency heads and Congress ``fully informed'' about the problems that IGs find. In short, Congress designed inspectors general to shine a bright light on waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the Federal bureaucracy with the hope that the executive and legislative branches could work together to do something about those problems. IGs, then, are the original swamp drainers, and--an equally important point for those who weren't around at the time it was created--the support for creating these offices was breathtakingly bipartisan. The vote in the House of Representatives where I was then a Member was 388 to 6. Now, more than 40 years later, we have 75 offices of inspectors general working to stop fraud and abuse. Their actions also save the taxpayers billions of dollars. In 2020 so far, IGs have identified more than $20 billion of potential savings through their audits, reports, and recommendations--$20 billion--and this year is not even half over.…”