https:\/\/reason.com\/2025\/10\/01\/the-white-house-just-defunded-a-federal-watchdog<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Before being shut down, the Council of Inspectors General was a shared resource for the dozens of inspectors general’s offices located in various government agencies across the executive branch. It provided training for investigatory staff and ran a tip line to collect reports of waste, fraud, and abuse.<\/p>\n
By shutting down the council, the White House may have also shuttered the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), which was created as part of the CARES Act and operated as a subcommittee of the council. (However, its website was still active on Wednesday morning.)<\/p>\n
The PRAC was tasked with overseeing pandemic relief spending\u2014which was absolutely rife with fraud\u2014and was recently reauthorized by Congress until 2034 as part of the 2025 tax bill.<\/p>\n
The White House’s decision to close the two federal watchdog agencies has drawn criticism from at least two Republican senators. “We urgently request an explanation for these actions and ask that you to promptly reverse course so that CIGIE and PRAC can continue their important oversight work uninterrupted,” wrote Sens. Susan Collins (R\u2013Maine) and Chuck Grassley (R\u2013Iowa) in a letter to OMB Director Russell Vought this week.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
Like with the earlier attempt at firing dozens of inspectors general from their posts, this latest effort at undermining the viability of the government’s watchdogs suggests the Trump administration is less interested in draining the swamp than in pushing aside people who might sound the alarm about corruption.” <\/p>\n
https:\/\/reason.com\/2025\/10\/01\/the-white-house-just-defunded-a-federal-watchdog\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[951,221,451,677,170],"class_list":["post-19856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-corruption","tag-donald-trump","tag-federal-government","tag-inspector-general","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19857,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19856\/revisions\/19857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}