Paul Martin was fired from his role as USAID Inspector General after he published a report warning that the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle USAID placed more than $480 million in food and other commodities in danger of spoilage or theft. Martin joins us to recount the chaotic few months leading up to his termination from USAID and how his firing fits into a broader assault on independent government oversight and Constitutional checks and balances that are essential to American democracy.
Martin served as Inspector General for USAID from January 2024 through February 11, 2025. He previously served for fourteen years as Inspector General for NASA and Vice Chair of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. He received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Penn State, where he was part of The Daily Collegian, and a law degree from Georgetown Law.
His lecture, which also features former U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, is available on the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's YouTube channel.
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem.
Cyanne Loyle
And I'm Cyanne Loyle.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy. Works. This week, we are talking with Paul Martin, who is the former inspector general of NASA and USAID. He will talk more about both of those positions in the interview, as well as the rest of his career in public service, and how it came to a fairly abrupt end earlier this year. But guys, if you can believe it, we've done, I think, almost 300 episodes of the show, and we've never talked about inspectors general. So this is a good opportunity, I think, to not only talk about Paul's work and how he was fired from his position, but also just more broadly, the role that inspector general play in our democracy and the role that they occupy as a voice in some respects for all of us in the federal government.
Chris Beem
All right, so I'm just going to pass right over the fact that we've done 300 of the because that's just okay, whatever, anyway. But yeah, I mean, you hear inspectors general, and you, you know, your eyes glaze over. And I think that's true of most of you know, most political scientists as well. And you know, so you think, Oh, wow, yeah, all right, I'm not gonna listen to this one or whatever, but, but this is a, this is an extremely important instrument within the government to keep eyes on itself, I guess is The right way to say it. They, they're not particularly beloved within the agencies they work for, because their job is to look over the shoulder of the people who are working for these agencies, running these agencies, running massively expensive projects within these agencies, and trying to determine if they're doing a good job, if they're being efficient, if they're wasting, if they're being good stewards, stewards of the of the public's resources.
Cyanne Loyle
And Chris, I want to jump in and just kind of assert the nonpartisan nature, right, the, in many ways, a political nature of the office, right? These are not political appointees, right? They're, you know, I don't know, supercharged accountants in some way, right? And so they're, they're really not turning over with the administration. And they're really, in some ways, like great defenders of the American taxpayer, right? They're, they're designed that it's an office designed to kind of protect the interests of the general public and to call out exactly these things, right, waste, fraud and abuse, when they see them in all different branches of the government. So I mean, you mentioned DOGE, I see them as, like very much in line with with many of the priorities of the Trump administration. But really, anyway, yeah, ostensibly, right, but, but really, I don't know such a such a powerful story from a branch of the government that we don't think very much about, and I don't know i, i My heart, my I'm kind of more excited about the inspectors general than I've, like, ever been, right? So you're right about the glazing over, but, but Paul really does such a great job of convincing us about how important this role is and also how exciting it is.
Chris Beem
You're right, exactly. And so Paul worked for a long time at NASA, and he talks about a, I think it was the James Webb telescope, where, you know, when they got a billion dollars in funding, and it ended up costing 10 times the amount and taking 10 times as long. And so that was a report from the inspector general. But when he was, you know, when his career took a new trajectory, he was Inspector General for the A ID, USAID. So can you say, saying, I know you have some experience with it. Can you just talk about what that agency was? I guess?
Cyanne Loyle
Yeah, I've done a lot of work, particularly in Sub Saharan Africa. And when you kind of move around other parts of the world, particularly the developing world, USAID is ubiquitous with humanitarian aid, the provision of basic food needs, medicine and other types of help to people, including disaster relief, but also kind of long term care and deep health programs, things like PEPFAR and some of the HIV and AIDS relief money and funds. All of this comes through USAID. One of the things that I love about it is on the boxes, particularly the even the tarps, the refugee tarps that you kind of see in pictures. It says USAID, but it's a gift from the American people. And so this is the American people's mechanism for for assisting people in other parts of the world that need different types of help. And yeah, I mean, USAID is I've always it's always been something I've been quite proud of when I'm when I'm moving around. Around. I was in Mozambique over the summer, and the area that I was in was was hit by a relatively large cyclone just a few months before, and they had tarps from USAID and other types of food and relief services. But a number of the people that I was talking to in focus groups, upon finding out I was American, actually said, Thank you, right? So they said, Thank you for the food that was delivered. We really needed that at the time. And so it's not, it's not just something that's printed on the side of the box. My My feeling in moving around is that the folks that are receiving that aid are clear that it is coming from the United States, and you know, to the extent that they get the opportunity to thank people for it. That's happened to me on a couple of occasions.
Chris Beem
This is a perfect time, kind of obligatory time to talk about the concept of a soft power, right? Because governments don't do anything merely for, you know, humanitarian reasons. There's always some dimension of self interest, and here it's tied directly to the fact that the people that you worked with in Mozambique understood that it was coming from the United States and were grateful to the United States for that, right?
Cyanne Loyle
All right. So first I'm going to push back that no governments never, do, ever do anything out of the goodness of their own heart. But in the case of soft power, I think, I think you're totally right, right? So there's, there's two main objectives when we think about foreign aid. The first is to help people, right? That's the humanitarian component of foreign aid. But the idea of soft power is that the United States projects power and influence through the the work that it does abroad. Now I'm not a development specialist. I'm actually in international security, and so I think a lot about soft power and the way in which it makes Americans more safe. So when we think about soft power, you one of the strong roles that USAID played was to be a presence on the ground in order to allow us government officials at other during conflicts, during other types of security situations, to be able to intervene right, to have more knowledge, to have presence, to kind of be in places where the US government is not but it's also worth noting that the US is not the first country to ever come up with the idea of soft power. As a matter of fact, it's central to the Chinese government's foreign policy at the moment, this is the Belt and Road Initiative that's putting a lot of money into economic development outside of China's borders. And one of the things, I mean, Paul's going to talk about the gutting and complete disassembly of USAID, and we should be concerned about that, not just from the importance of supporting people in at their at their worst times, right of their most basic needs. When we talk about food and medicine provisions, these are really folks that whose lives are now directly at risk, because I think the number will get much higher, particularly when we think about long term programs like HIV prevention, right? And, you know, malaria support and things like that. These are programs that are designed to keep people from dying that have now gone away, but China has moved right into those spots, right? And so these are countries that don't have the resources themselves to deal with these problems, and so they've sought out support from other actors.
Jenna Spinelle
I think we'll we'll certainly hear Paul talk more about why he wanted to become part of USAID his connection to the mission of that work and what's lost, as well as what he and some of his colleagues did to try to save the institution, so to speak, as it was crumbling amid the DOGE period. So lots to talk about in this one. I'm excited for you to hear this conversation with Paul Martin.
Jenna Spinelle
Paul Martin, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.
Paul Martin
My pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation.
Jenna Spinelle
So we have a lot to talk about the role that inspectors general play in our democracy and your experience in that role, but before we dive into some of that, you know, I think our audience is probably broadly familiar with what an Inspector General is. But I'd love to just hear from you, in your mind, what is the job?
Paul Martin
Sure. Well, the job actually stretches back to the Revolutionary War days where George Washington had a gentleman, a Prussian officer by the name of Baron Friedrich von Steuben. And I love saying von Steuben, so I'm gonna say that repeatedly. And he was a Prussian officer that came over and really helped the kind of ragtag Revolutionary Army and Washington's troops professionalize. And so the concept of an Inspector General has been around for well over 200 years. Years the modern inspector general concept really was formed back in 1978 when President Carter signed legislation that created modern Inspector Generals at the time in a dozen large federal agencies. But over the last 48 years, there's 74 inspector generals in the federal government covering pretty much every government entity, from large organizations like the Department of Defense and Veterans Administration to small organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts or Amtrak. The primary role of an inspector general under the current framework are two things. Each Office of Inspector General oversees the programs and personnel of their respective agency, and they have two tasks. One is an audit function, which it can be a financial audit, it can be a program audit. Can be an IT audit, and the second is to do investigations of the programs and personnel at their agency, and these can be administrative investigations, or in some cases, they can be criminal investigations. So that is the function. And again, the size of Inspector General offices range from could be as low as five people in a very tiny agency up to at the Department of Defense. They have over 1800 people in their Office of Inspector General
Jenna Spinelle
Paul tell me a little bit about your backgrounds. Did you come from a political family? Or how did you become interested in politics and government?
Paul Martin
Yeah, again, apolitical nonpartisan really has been my mantra over the last 40 years, but really started out in a different career trajectory, journalism major from Penn State University, and then fulfilled my sort of childhood dream of being a reporter back when we had newspapers, those things with paper and words on them back then. And so I was a newspaper in a city, Greenville, South Carolina, and I was the cop reporter for the first year, and the court reporter my second year, and then I was the investigative reporter for the newspaper. But when I was the court reporter, I caught the law bug and decided I wanted to get a legal education. But at that point, there was a singular law school in South Carolina, and it was in Columbia, South Carolina, and I was up in Greenville, so I sort of filed that back in the back of my brain, as chance would have it, a federal judge who I knew in Greenville, South Carolina, was appointed by President Reagan as the first chairman of this brand new agency called the United States Sentencing Commission, and judge Wilkins, that was his name, turned to me one day, and I was in his chambers, interviewing him on something else, and said, Paul, would you be interested coming to Washington? Help me stand up this new federal agency? Well, it's sort of one of those door number two, door number one moments in your life which way. And it totally changed my life. And so, you know, one, it was a tremendously exciting, unique opportunity to stand up a brand new federal agency in Washington, DC. And number two, it put me in a city that had five evening law schools, and so obviously said yes, worked at the Sentencing Commission, went to law school at night. We wrote the first set of what were called the federal sentencing guidelines. Worked there for 12 years. And then, after the Sentencing Commission, I sort of transitioned into the inspector general community. And then, in order, worked at the Department of Justice for a dozen years, became the inspector general at NASA for 14 years. And then finally, most recently, was the inspector general at USA ID, so sort of about 25 years in the Inspector General, federal oversight community. But again, those entire 25 years in that community, as well as the preceding 12, I've never character my characterized myself as being sort of in the political community, or being political. I was a apolitical, nonpartisan career government official.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and so did you? Did you feel like throughout your career, have you felt like Congress is on your side, so to speak, or you guys were working toward the same goal, or sort of were aligned very much?
Paul Martin
So I mean, we have a lot of constituencies, Inspector Generals, first and foremost, one of your stakeholders. And they hate words like stakeholders, but one of your stakeholders is the agency itself. You're doing an audit of one of their programs, and you're relaying your findings to the agency and saying, Hey, here's where you missed the mark, or here's where inefficiencies are, and here's some recommendations for you to help improve that program. So they're the first audience, but a second big, big audience is Congress, and has been over the decades that inspector generals because Congress has very small staff and they can't conduct the kind of detailed, specific audits or certainly investigations that an in house inspector general say at HHS or the department. Department of Justice can do. And so Congress relies on the work of offices of Inspector General and the GAO for this kind of assistance and oversight. And they often, Congress often uses our reports and reviews to conduct oversight hearings. So they really were one of the consumers. So yes, now sometimes members of Congress, they do play politics, and they would use the results say we had a negative audit, negative in the sense that we found at NASA that a rocket development program was hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, depending on an individual members of Congress's perspective, they might use that as our findings, apolitical findings as a weapon or a shield to defend the agency that was up to them how they used our results, but But over the years, Congress has absolutely been a supporter of this independent oversight because it benefited them so much.
Jenna Spinelle
Do you think that's still the case today?
Paul Martin
Sadly, no, they may still feel that way, but they're not acting on those feelings, because there was little to no objection or substantive pushback when on January 24 the president removed 16 inspectors general on a Friday night, the classic Friday Night Massacre. There was very little pushback, and particularly by the people who might have been able to move the needle a bit. The current administration removed 16 inspector generals, like I said, on Friday night, June 24 without explanation, without 30 days notice, no detailed explanation, and it sent it really rocked the inspector general community, because IGS had been seen by both Republicans and Democrats over the past 48 years, By and large as apolitical actors that that even when the administration changed from Republican to Democrat or democrat to republican, the inspector generals themselves continued. All the other political appointees resigned, and then the new crowd got, got to name their own people, but IGS were always carved out and seen as different. Yeah, because we were experts in our agencies, we were apolitical. The statute says we're supposed to be chosen for our apolitical qualifications. And so that was the understanding, and that had been the history for the last, you know, 40 plus years. And to see that turned on its head overnight was shocking. But what was the even sadder than that was the lack of pushback, again, by the handful of folks in Congress that could have made a difference. Yeah, most we saw was a letter sent to the the White House asking for an explanation. And of course, the letter was never answered, right? It wasn't.
Jenna Spinelle
So speaking of pushback. I mean, this is, this is a statute. Can it be challenged in the courts, or what other avenues of recourse are available?
Paul Martin
Yeah, eight of the inspector generals that were fired on that January 24 Friday night, filed a lawsuit, and unfortunately, the lawsuit dragged on and on. It was, it was for immediate intervention, but the court for whatever reasons. I don't know the reasons. It dragged on for six or eight months, and the court finally opined that, clearly the president violated the statute. But this got wrapped up. That decision got wrapped up in a good number of other challenges to some extent.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, there was a lot happening at that particular point in time.
Paul Martin
Yeah, and not to get into, you know, too deep a legal discussion, but this particular administration is leaning heavily into something called the unitary executive theory, which the executive, the chief executive, the President, has incredibly broad authority over every aspect and every individual in the executive branch. And the theory goes, you push back on any attempts to cabin that, that discretion, that unlimited discretion. And so they would look at a statute like the inspector general statute that sets up these requirements, that gives the President the authority to remove an inspector general, but says, okay, but before you do that, you've got to do these two things, the 30 day notice and the substantive reasons. They don't buy that. They say that the unitary under the unitary executive theory, without you can't put any restrictions or any constraints on my authority to run the executive branch. And you were seeing that argument play out across lots of programs and lots of agencies.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, so you were at NASA during the first Trump administration. What was your relationship with the administration like in that time period?
Paul Martin
Yeah, I was, actually was quite positive. There was a gentleman named James Bridenstine, who was a former congressman from, I think, Oklahoma, who was named NASA administrator, and we had a very appropriate relationship. And I say appropriate inspector generals, occupy this odd position. We're we're in our agencies, but we have the responsibility and the authority to conduct these audits and investigations of our own choosing, and so it's very dangerous, and I think inappropriate, to become chummy with the head of your agency, because you may be investigating him or her a week from now, and so you want to maintain a professional communicative relationship, and you want them to know that there's a set of rules and procedures that you're going to follow. You're not going to try to sandbag the agency for, you know, a cheap one day story in the Washington Post or New York Times by leaking a document or a half finished review, but you're going to be issuing reports that may be perceived or are perceived as unflattering, that there's a program that's $500 million over budget, or three years, you know, the James Webb Space Telescope. When that was rolled out and NASA convinced Congress to begin funding it, NASA scientists promised they could build the James Webb Space Telescope, which is a marvel, let me say that at the outset, but they said they could build that for just over a billion dollars in seven years. Okay, fast forward. It took close to 20 years at 10 times that $10 billion now I'm not saying that the science that's derived from the James Webb Space Telescope is not worth $10 million that's not my decision to make. What I do know as someone who audits these programs is when you have an organization that says we can do that for $1 billion and then Congress gets out his checkbook and thinks it's writing a billion dollar check, but instead, over the years, is writing a $10 billion check. Then the project gets too big to fail. You've already invested $7 billion in it. You think, what's another billion dollars? That kind of thing? We need to call that out as an inspector general. So the relationship is important, but the relationship that we had, he was entirely professional he had, and we had the best interests of the organization NASA at heart, and we had a terrific relationship,
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, so talk to me about the move to USAID, what were you hoping to accomplish there, and sort of what drew you to leave the position at NASA.
Paul Martin
I was approached about taking the USAID position. And again, much like having no science background, I had no background in international humanitarian or international development work, but those issues, like for many people, touched my heart, and so I was very honored and pleased to take that position. Only lasted for 14 minutes, and I was just beginning to get my arms around this. Any agency has its own nomenclature and programs and history. This is worldwide stuff, and to give you an example, so there were 10,000 people at USAID, 10,000 employees. My Office of Inspector General had 300 so there's the singular headquarters office, formerly of USAID in Washington, DC. But my Office of Inspector General, we had 12 field offices in places like Pretoria, Manila, Kiev, Ukraine, Jerusalem, El Salvador. So it was a very, very different.
Jenna Spinelle
So you were not part of that January, Friday Night Massacre
Paul Martin
I was not, which was, and people have asked me why, and I have no clue. You know, did they just miss me, which I find hard to believe, because they on January 24 they wiped out some of the largest agency, Inspector Generals like DOD and VA and against HHS, Health and Human Services, those are three of the biggest but they also had some very small ones, the Small Business Administration, or the EPA or on the smaller side. And so I was coming off a plane that Friday night. I had just arrived at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, after spending a week in Israel with a small team of Office of Inspector General, folks from my office and we were meeting with the Israeli, Israeli Defense Forces, Israeli government officials were meeting with the United Nations, folks that were on the ground, a lot of the NGOs, like Catholic Charities, Mercy Corps, folks that were all. All trying to get food and medical supplies into Gaza because so many of the land borders and we were over there trying to think, how are we going to best position ourselves this Office of Inspector General to do oversight of the hundreds of millions of dollars of us, funds that the United States is spending through us, aid and State Department, but mostly aid to try to get supplies and humanitarian relief into and so how can we do oversight that's that ensures, to the extent we can, that the food and the medicine is getting in, it is not being stolen. It's not being diverted by Hamas or some of the other crime families there. So that's what we So I flew back into Washington on, maybe not on that Friday night. And, you know, after traveling, I think, like, 22 hours, flipped on my cell phone, and my cell phone exploded. I got fired. Did you get fired? Etc. And, you know,
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, I was going to ask you about the group text.
Paul Martin
It was mind blowing. And I was like, what, you know, again, having stumbled off a plane after 22 hours and like, three connections to get from Jerusalem out. And it was, it was Wow. And just so happened that, of course, all these terminate in the the 1617, IGS that got removed that Friday night, received two sentence emails on their official government system. It just so happened that I was having problems with my USAID. IT equipment I couldn't get on the system, and I thought I've been frozen out. I'm, you know, I'm I've also been wiped out. Well, I've come to find out it was just a quirk in my system, and when I got on my email, my USAID email, the next day, there was no email from me. So yeah, I wasn't fired at that time.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, but it was just just a few weeks later, right? So talk about the circumstances that did ultimately lead to your firing from USAID.
Paul Martin
Yeah. So what was happening? The context is important again, the new administration came in January 20, and on January 20, the President issued 26 executive orders. He's since issued many more. But in the 27 of the 26 executive orders, there was one that put that stopped all new foreign assistance obligations, okay, new. And then it was a key word there, key phrase in the in the executive order. And so that created a good bit of turmoil at USAID, as far as implementing that or respecting that executive order, okay, I understand new. I shouldn't enter into any new programs with some of these partners, Mercy Corps, Catholic Charities, the UN whatever. What about ongoing programs? Or, what about a contractor who we paid, you know, a million dollars to deliver bottled water to South Sudan who's already made the delivery and is just awaiting payment? Can I Go ahead? And so that was very, very unclear on that. And so four days later, Secretary Rubio, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, issued something called a stop work order. And a stop work order is exactly what it sounds. Put your pencils down. Nothing. Okay? And at the same time, so this happened that that threw USAID even to even more of a tizzy. They were trying to figure out what new obligations meant, and now stop work order, break all contracts, end all programs. And that was just a shocker. At the same time, USAID was becoming the first sort of recipient, I don't mean to be too smart alecky, but the the first recipient of the Department of government efficiency, the DOGE oversight. We were probably the test case, yeah, the canary in the coal mine. So Elon Musk. This sort of was at the height of Elon Musk's power as a head of DOGE, he brought a team in to USAID and because he was going to look for waste, fraud and abuse over the same the same mantra, trying to do your job, the same triptych. And, you know, I think some folks hoped and thought that, hey, maybe you know the OIG partner with DOGE, but that they would certainly reach out, because we've been doing this for 50 years, looking for waste, fraud and abuse, efficiency, etc. We could say, Hey, here's what's on our list. And then they would do what they would do. No, no such reach out. Came at USAID and and my colleagues across the IG community, no reach out. So they came in to USAID again, there were these tensions about folks who were accused by DOGE folks or State Department folks of violating the President's executive order because they didn't know whether they wanted to pay. You know, the person who delivered the bottled water in Sudan who had already delivered it, and that. Wasn't a new obligation. And so things got really bollocks really quickly up there, and it got ugly and and I don't think, I don't have no insight, but my sense is, on all evidence, that the new administration, prior to this, late Feb, late January, early February, intended to close USAID, but they got what they thought was pushback from bureaucrats at USAID, and the reaction was just, you know, almost instantaneous. So within a matter of three to four weeks, the agency headquarters have been closed. Hundreds and hundreds of folks had been kicked off and frozen out, placed on administrative leave and frozen out of the IT systems and email systems they weren't permitted to communicate with their colleagues at the State Department, at the UN or folks that were what we call implementers in the field, in their countries, that were actually doing The work for the programs they were managing, and it was chaos.
Jenna Spinelle
And so you wrote a report critical of some of that efforts around food going bad, and some of those things where these products were kind of caught in the middle, right, and people were unsure of whether they could be completely fulfilled.
Paul Martin
Yeah, I would say critical. We raised the red flag, which is what I think a responsible inspector general would do. We said, given the turmoil, given the hundreds of people who manage these programs all around the world that have been placed on admin leave, that have been barred from the headquarters, that have been placed incommunicado again, they couldn't reach out to the State Department without permission, without approval, they couldn't reach out, and so they couldn't coordinate. On the ground, there was over $480 million of food, medicine and other goods that were at risk. They were in ports, they were on the ocean. They were going to be in warehouses that was on risk of spoilage, theft or diversion. And so we raised that concern is to make sure, while you've taken these personnel actions, really for other reasons, you're going to either going to shrink down or you're going to demolish the agency at the same time, be aware this is one of the effects of that. And so we put that, I think it was, a five page alert out to raise concerns, and so they were aware of it. We issued that alert on February 10, and then on the next day, February 11, I received a two sentence email that removed me as Inspector General, effective immediately. And the second sentence was, thank you for your service.
Jenna Spinelle
Oh, wow. I mean, it must have been just such a gut punch after decades in in public service. But I mean, did you given what had transpired in the previous weeks and months, like, did you think that this could be a potential outcome when you put out that that alert?
Paul Martin
Very much so strongly, yeah, yeah, yeah. But given, given the administration's in their early weeks, their removal of inspectors general, and their seeming almost disdain for independent oversight, any kind of review, that could be perceived as unflattering in any way, and we're talking about government programs. There's too much flattering about a government program. I guess, when people get their social security check or their Medicare coverage and things are running, well, there's, there's fewer complaints. But no, we, I and we understood that this would not be received, yeah, but you did it anyway. We did why? Because, because that's what an inspector general does and and that's what we've done for the last 48 years. And I'm not setting myself up as Joan of Arc or anything, but it needed to be done. There was 400 close to a half a billion dollars in food and medicine that was at risk of spoilage, theft or diversion. People needed to know. People in the building needed to know within USAID, people on the Hill needed know who were in a position to sort of intervene, and the public needed to know, and so we did it.
Jenna Spinelle
So I think this is interesting. There's sort of this, this calculus about, like, do you speak up? How much do you speak up? I've seen this sort of play out, at least what I could tell from an outsider's perspective across a lot of different parts of the government, in the Trump administration or administrations, right? Like, do you stick your neck out and risk, you know, being fired or not being able to do your job? Or do you find some way to like work within the constraints and still try to get the job done in some way, even if it might be in a reduced capacity. Or, you know, what you perceive to be a reduced capacity, I guess. Can you talk about some of those calculations?
Paul Martin
Sure, and again. Preface my remarks, I have been an apolitical No. Non Partisan career employee for my 40 years, there is an unmistakable, and I think clearly intentional effort to chill oversight, independent oversight, and the removal of now I was removed two weeks after the 16 were removed, and just in the last two weeks, two additional inspectors general have been removed, so at least 20 have been removed. Don't think the folks in the community are unaware of that the inspector general community and it has had a decided chilling effect. And so I have several concerns. I have concerns that an inspector general will not open those discretionary reviews that they should of the hot button, excuse me, hot button programs, or the big ticket issues, or the high dollar program. They won't open those reviews for fear of what they might find, and then the reception from the agency head or the White House, or even if they do open a review, they'll pull their punches. They'll use such guarded and cautious and safe language that it won't really appropriately, you know, convey the evidence based findings of their review. And I think that's what we're seeing that play out now in the executive branch and in the Inspector General's Offices. You remove that many inspector generals, so the if there's a deputy, the deputy comes up to be the acting at my organization. I didn't have a deputy in place at the time. So you reach further down in the organization, these people didn't sign up for that. They don't want to be the target, you know, and they're doing what they can. So I think, in answer to your specific question, it has had an absolute chilling effect across the oversight community. And I think it's probably agency by OIG, by OIG, how they're handling it. They are. They deciding to do not unimportant work, but less high profile work, to kind of keep their head down and stay, you know, get the bullseye off their back. One of the things we're going to see is the Department of Defense, IG is doing a review, I think, completing a review soon, of Secretary Hegseth's use of a communications app called signal. And if you may remember the story when the the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was somehow included on a text chain that allegedly had confidential attack information regarding an upcoming US attack. And so the inspector general undertook this investigation. I think they were going to open it themselves, but they were specifically asked to conduct a review by the lead Republican and the lead Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And so that review is ongoing right now, so we'll see. You know, are they going to pull their punches? Are they going to now, the official DoD spokesman has already blasted the review as, and this is his words, quote, a witch hunt, you know, by Biden administration holdovers, and that couldn't be further from from the truth. And so to attack the review halfway through, it hasn't even been released yet, and the official DoD spokesman is undercutting and attempting to attack the review. Don't think that goes unaware is having a decidedly chilling effect on it. And again, it's hard to think that that's not intentional.
Jenna Spinelle
So what does it look like to go back to a world before 1978 before the sort of modern inspector general framework was was implemented, what you know, how much more rampant was waste, fraud and abuse before that time, or sort of, what do we risk losing if we end up back in that place?
Paul Martin
Yeah, I think what we risk losing is the strides that we've made over these past decades. And people like to throw big numbers out, but truly and literally, offices of Inspector General across government have saved the taxpayer billions and billions of dollars. They've been that canary in the coal mine being given the early warning system on so many different areas, they've raised the visibility and hopefully the public's trust in their government and in how their taxpayer dollars are being spent. By pointing out waste, fraud, mismanagement, abuse, by conducting criminal cases against bad actors, bad contractors, bad federal employees. They will continue to do some of that. But again, I'm concerned deeply about the long, lasting impacts of the removal of over 20 inspector generals. What's the new administration supposed to do at some point when the other political party gets in? Mm. Are they going to take the same tack? Are they going to take the high road? I'm afraid that the system this independent, apolitical system where IGS stay, they are permanent fixtures of government. Yes, they can be removed, and probably some of them should be removed because they aren't doing the effective job. I'm not trying to create a system in which there are supreme court justices and they have lifetime, you know, tenure, but to turn on the head and to crack something that I think was so effective on behalf of the American taxpayer, I don't see how we put it back together.
Jenna Spinelle
Any final words you'd like to leave our listeners with anything that they can do here to make an impact in some way.
Paul Martin
Well, again, you know, educate yourselves and support offices of Inspector General. If you're so inclined, reach out to your member of Congress to try to stand up and speak up for offices of Inspector General and be involved.
Jenna Spinelle
Well, we'll leave it there. Paul Martin, thank you so much for joining us today.
Paul Martin
Thank you so much. My pleasure.
Cyanne Loyle
Well, Chris, I know you started out by saying that our eyes were glassing over a little bit at the topic, but I found that to be just such a compelling and passionate discussion about both the workings of American government, but also just a story of, you know, a decent guy, right, an honest and fair minded bureaucrat who I should mention is a proud alum of Penn State, just, you know, it really, for me, fleshed out this, this concept of the bureaucracy, And I think we often forget what these folks do, and kind of how, what an important role they play in the functioning of American government and in many of the programs and policies that that we that, you know, help help in our lives. And one of the things that really strikes me about Paul is just what a deep Patriot he is. Yeah, he has really kind of dedicated his life to public service for our government, right, and for the American people, from a nonpartisan, kind of very apolitical way, and has really spent his entire career in these roles with he just speaks of his job with such passion, right?
Chris Beem
And such a sense of integrity. No, I would not do that. No, I don't know the answer to that. You know? I mean just, you think about the not just his agency, which was what, how many 1000s of individuals all over the world, but other agencies where that sense of integrity, that sense of public service, that sense of patriotism, bought you precisely nothing in, you know, in the eyes of the Trump administration and in the eyes of DOGE. And so, you know, we as a nation are greatly diminished as a result of the you know, the the absence or you know, or the rejection of folks like him, all over, all over the all over the federal bureaucracy.
Cyanne Loyle
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's people with true character, right, character and integrity, you're absolutely right. And when we talk about it all over the bureaucracy, I think, I mean, Paul's story is in some ways unique in that the entire organization, right, the entire agency, of US aid was dismantled. But I've been given a lot of thought recently to many of the other agencies and organizations that are still functioning, but without the role of the Inspector General, right, right? So, so now these organizations are marching on, but without a dedicated staff to paying attention to this abuse and this fraud. You know, we can use this as a transition to thinking about the unitary executive theory, but it really is a government that is working hard to dismantle checks on its power, and even while saying that they're concerned about abuse and they're concerned about fraud and things like this, but this is such a powerful Step to removing division of the bureaucracy whose key function is to check power right and to check abuse.
Chris Beem
Let's be specific here check executive power and and the the unitary executive theory is that within the executive branch, which includes every every federal agency, the sole and ultimate authority about anything that goes on within those agencies is the president. And so it doesn't matter that you know, you see yourself as having a nonpartisan, you know, public servant role. It only matters that this agency. Agency either has or can potentially have some constraint on the operation of the President, that the ability of the President to do what he wants, and therefore it needs to go.
Cyanne Loyle
And it's not just constraint, it's also information, right? So one of the things in the authoritarian politics literature that comes up often is, if you have governments where there's too many yes men, right, too many people who are giving, in this case, the executive or the leader of an authoritarian regime, the information that she or he wants, they don't have good intel, right? They don't have good information with which to make decisions. And so even if you filled the inspectors General's office with a bunch of political appointees, you'd at least be getting this information. And so part of my concern is that we've also lost an information stream. We've lost an organization, or we've lost individuals whose job it was to at least know what was going on. And so we have an incredible amount of UN checked financial power, even within these, these other organs, organizations and agencies, right? So nobody is now paying attention to how these multi billion dollar projects are being run. It just doesn't make any sense.
Chris Beem
Well, it it's deeper than that, even the you know, the idea that there is information that could be useful to an to a department, a department head, a cabinet member, or, you know, A president, you know, presumes the idea that you're concerned about that information, that you have some objective other than your own will. And you know, when you what, what Elon Musk said about the USA ID, you know, he called it a Viper's nest of radical left Marxists who hate America and a criminal organization, and those are such scurrilous claims that to make them without a scintilla of evidence, without anything to back it up, is to show that you don't care about evidence, you don't care about argument. You're just saying stuff to get it to accomplish what you want, and you will really say anything in order to do that. And you know that there's a large part of the American populace who's not going to dispute it, and let's face it, Congress isn't either.
Cyanne Loyle
So I think it's now very clear what happens if you actually exercise oversight over the government, and not everybody has, you know, the opportunity to be quite as brave and as principled as Paul was, I think he was. He was pretty clear that he knew he was going to lose his job if he released the report and he did it right? So, so first, we have this kind of unmistakable chilling effect. But then second, you know, Paul talks about this kind of Humpty, Dumpty phenomenon, this idea that what we see now is what I truly believe is an irreparable harm that has been done to the American bureaucracy. So, I mean, USAID is not going to reconvene if, you know, if President Trump or the Republicans are voted out of office, it would take decades to get it back to the same level of functioning, to hire back all of the people you know into the positions that have been overturned. This is the part about Paul's story that is, I think the most devastating for me is that it's not clear to me we don't put this back together next election cycle. And to the extent that there's rhetoric about, well, just wait till the midterms, or just wait till the next election cycle, right? It's like, Yeah, but this stuff is really broken, right? This is broken in a way that it's not clear to me how we put it back together.
Chris Beem
The other thing you know, you know, we call ourselves, democracy works and and this is not the most you know, exemplar, exemplary example of that, but the the one thing that you mentioned, that I think is worth mentioning, just to give people, you know, some kind of sense of hope is that you mentioned that, you know, authoritarians surround themselves with yes people, yes men and women, and that that is how they staff. They're looking for loyalty and for affirmation, or whatever they do. And that leads to a bureaucracy that is almost inherently incompetent. And you know clearly what you've shown is an example of that. And so this is an Achilles heel of authoritarians that they're, that they are. Are so worried in their own preservation that they make mistakes that they don't hear counter, you know, countervailing opinions. They don't hear facts that they don't like. And that is, that's not a good way to do anything, let alone run a country. It's not a prudent way to do anything.
Cyanne Loyle
So you know what I would say, Chris, I would say, when you're selecting only on loyalty and affirmation of your cause, then you don't get the true patriots and integral bureaucrats that you see in Paul, right?
Chris Beem
Yeah, yeah. You don't get no Absolutely. And you know what good for him for writing that report and sending it the day before he got fired? It's like, you know what? I know what's gonna happen. I'm gonna do my job until you fire. And my job is what, what gets me out of the bed in the morning and what gives meaning to my life. And I know I'm gonna lose it, but damn it, I'm gonna can do it until I lose it. So anyway, okay, well, you know what it's it's good for all of us to recognize a moment in which we find ourselves and to not sugarcoat things. And there's not a lot of opportunity to sugarcoat this, but, but what we do have is, here's an example of what's possible in our federal government, what what we can strive to and so that's, you know, that's worth listening to for democracy works. I'm Chris Beem.
Cyanne Loyle
And I'm Cyanne Loyle.
Chris Beem
Thanks for listening.