On The Need for Pentagon Oversight
It’s been almost seven years since the Senate appointed anyone to the Pentagon’s top oversight role. There hasn’t been a confirmed Pentagon watchdog since Obama was President. Pentagon Inspector General (IG) Jon Rymer, who stepped down on Jan. 6, 2016, was the last man in the position. President Barack Obama appointed Glenn Fine to head the office in an acting capacity until he could receive Senate confirmation. However, confirmation never came.
President Donald Trump didn’t put forward a nominee for the role until 2020. That nomination lapsed when President Joe Biden took office, after which it took the Democratic leader almost a year to name his own candidate.
Today, more than six years after the last confirmed IG, Congress has still not signed off on a nominee to serve as the top watchdog of one of the government’s largest, most well-funded agencies. An acting agency head is simply not the same as a permanent office holder and this gap is a loss for government oversight.
Politicians love to talk about fiscal responsibility. With an ever-rising Pentagon budget and more than a billion dollars’ worth of weapons flowing from the United States to Ukraine each month, the Defense Department needs oversight. After Biden withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) blocked all Pentagon and State Department nominees from receiving “unanimous consent” in the Senate, a procedural roadblock that can only be overturned through a floor debate. While Senate leaders have taken the time to overrule Hawley’s block for some other nominees, none has been willing to do so to help DoD IG nominee Robert Storch, who has awaited Senate approval since his nomination advanced past the Senate Armed Services Committee in March of 2022. Given Storch’s long experience in watchdog roles, his confirmation should have been a formality.
Since the first Pentagon IG took office in 1983, an acting IG has held the job approximately 40 percent of the time, hobbling the office’s oversight capabilities in ways that we will never truly know.
