It was bad enough when the White House fired Gerald Walpin, the honest and diligent Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service (which oversees AmeriCorps), without cause and without properly notifying Congress, and then lied about what it had done and why.
Now comes word that Congress has underfunded this crucial internal watchdog, leaving the bloated AmeriCorps bureaucracy and liberal-grant-making apparatus without adequate oversight. I’m still trying to get the exact numbers and supporting documentation but I am told by a very reliable source that the IG office’s budget has been slashed by an astonishing 40 percent, from $6.7 million to $4 million. The overall CNCS budget, though, took a hit of only about 3 percent from its base of $1.076 billion. So the suspect agency gets to keep chugging along at about the same pace, but the watchdog supposed to keep it honest gets gutted. This is nuts. If anything, government as a whole should be seriously downsized, but agency IGs should receive at least as much money as before, because IGs typically bring to light expensive forms of fraud or mismanagement, and thus can actually save taxpayers money in the long run.
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