The Most Important Public Servants You’ve Never Heard Of

Inspectors general have been referred to as the most powerful public officials you’ve never heard of. In fact, IGs are a crucial part of our democratic system’s checks and balances: They expose government misconduct, fraud, and abuse, and they promote transparency in government operations. Over the years, IGs have uncovered wasteful expenditures in pandemic-relief funding, investigated alleged misconduct by the secretary of Veterans Affairs, and brought to light the FBI’s misuse of sensitive national-security letters.

Of course, IGs are not the only check on government—Congress, the courts, and the media also act as checks—but IGs are uniquely placed inside federal agencies, with unfettered access to all agency officials and records. They have the independent authority to investigate, audit, and report on the full range of government programs. An effective IG has the power to improve government and raise public trust in agencies; an incompetent or ineffective inspector general can have the opposite effect.

Recently, a series of allegations surfaced regarding the conduct of Joseph Cuffari, the IG at the Department of Homeland Security. , Cuffari knew about the deletion of Secret Service text messages relating his own investigators from seeking to recover the text messages. Now the chair of the committee says that Cuffari is with its investigation of the missing texts.