Trumps federal watchdogs are doing the job past IGs let slide and the old guard hates it

A former federal inspector general has been sniping at President Donald Trump’s approach to rooting out government fraud — but his complaints sound less like a serious defense of oversight and more like a bitter kiss-off from a spurned ex-bureaucrat.“The watchdogs have crossed a dangerous line,” Mark Greenblatt intoned in the Daily Beast.“They’ve become lapdogs” — “MAGA lapdogs,” as his headline put it.He’s furious that my inspector general colleagues and I are joining the wide-ranging effort, led by Vice President JD Vance, to crack down on the fraud that’s looting our national treasury.Greenblatt’s argument rests on a flawed premise: He claims that supporting such a mission somehow prevents an inspector general from conducting independent oversight.That’s nonsense.The Inspector General Act, which established the job I hold at the Labor Department, does not require blindness to policy priorities.It requires independence in conducting audits, investigations and oversight.There’s a significant difference between supporting efforts to protect taxpayer dollars and compromising investigative integrity.Apparently, that distinction escapes Greenblatt.In fact, rooting out waste, fraud and abuse is precisely what inspectors general are supposed to do.My office has aggressively pursued pandemic-era unemployment fraud, identifying hundreds of millions of dollars in recoverable taxpayer funds and freezing suspicious accounts.We’ve launched investigations that have resulted in arrests, prosecutions and recovery efforts nationwide.None of that has compromised a single investigation.In fact, our investigative work has expanded — because we refuse to sit on the sidelines issuing academic critiques while criminals steal from hard-working Americans.Greenblatt seems particularly disturbed that I’m working side by side with Keith Sonderling, the Labor Department’s acting secretary, and actively participating in Vance’s White House Fraud Task Fo...