Let's Talk About Oversight, Baby.

Let's talk about oversight baby.

Let's talk about you and me.

Let's talk about all the good things, and the bad things that may be.

Sorry, got carried away there, but really, let’s talk about this.

Most of the time when I end up introducing myself professionally, I do a spin on the “you may know me from” setup but also joke that I’ve been through a lot of roles due to ADHD and a strong desire to be exposed to as much of the world as I can and learn from it. But from that I get to provide contexts from various sectors and levels and interpret that work across various audiences. Today you happen to be one of those audiences.

Currently, if you’ve been at least following the news in the United States, there’s been a lot going on not just in politics, but how the government operates. We’ve seen the creation and activation of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE for the acronym inclined, which has been tasked with a pseudo techno-oversight role. It’s purported they are seeking out waste, fraud and abuse of government programs and the underlying supporting tax dollars.

However, much like the French Taunter in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, the government can say, “we’ve already got one”.

In fact, nearly every agency, especially for each of the twenty-four (24) CFO Act agencies, has an inspector general. Their primary role is to provide oversight of the agency’s various missions each agency supports, including grants and direct public programs and activities. One agency even has a second specific function oversight inspector general, one for Tax Administration which oversees just the Internal Revenue Service. To say there isn’t active oversight of government programs is not only highly disingenuous, but demonstrates no understanding of what they do.

So let’s demystify this from not only a multi-agency, multi-year former Federal civil servant, but also somebody who spent a large portion of that time in a role supporting one of those oversight roles as a Deputy Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of the Inspector General (OIG). In that role I supported the technology operations in a varied leadership role, including budgeting, human resources, enterprise architecture, security and software and systems development. Probably acquired and demonstrated more useful business and technical skills than most CEOs ever have to practically apply, an amazing opportunity I was glad to support.

A lot of the popular folk knowledge that gets spread around is how much of your tax dollar goes to support the Department of Defense (DoD), but sadly that knowledge is technically flawed due to the fact, when all programs are combined, HHS holds that somewhat dubious prize, with 27% versus 15% (https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/). In turn, HHS also has the largest OIG at approximately 1,800-1,700 staff on average to oversee $1.8 trillion annual budget and over 80,000 employees but returns $10 for every $1 invested in recovery of funds.

Government programs, contrary to what is espoused by many a public figure, are not inherently or by design, fraudulent nor rife with grift and theft. However, by nature, humans work to be less than truthful and honest and abuse these programs to game the system or just to perpetrate fraud, abuse and theft of tax dollars through agency services. The OIG is there to identify, hunt down and prosecute those who do, along with other Federal partners like the Department of Justice (DOJ). Essentially their role is to find the “bad guys” and “bad girls” and make sure they come to justice.

Some of that activity takes place auditing charges submitted to the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) by doctors and other health providers to ensure reimbursements paid out from paycheck taxes for these services, as an entitlement, is done so according to laws and regulations, as well as done so fairly. Most of the work is fighting fraudulent charges in this case, and a lot of it is data analysis on very sophisticated systems by auditors with specialties in billing, forensics accounting, healthcare policies and programs.

Their work isn’t just looking for things such as overcharges by providers, or maybe double billing, or other malfeasance, but also weeding out prescription abuse, such as controlled narcotics. This work actually saves lives by using technology to detect prescribing practices that may indicate “pill mills” to provide illicit medication to addicts. Getting those prescribers reprimanded, which can take various legal remedies – from suspensions to fines to jail time depending on the depth and seriousness of the abuse.

Again, this is one portion of their work – as there’s also other groups within HHS’ OIG, including Inspections and Evaluations, General Counsel, Investigations and the Management branches. Those divisions are often mirrored into other agencies’ inspector generals, which both looks to their external facing programs as well as internally towards the operations of their “home agencies”. Small, but mighty, they are the eyes and ears of the taxpayers, citizens and other beneficiaries of programs administered by the Federal government.

They are also very tightly knit. They know their missions; they are guided by ethics to uphold those missions to ensure they are run with integrity and trust. In fact, the community of inspector generals is overseen by another group, “”, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) is an independent government agency that performs that oversight and guides standards of program operations.

I was proud to support our mission at HHS OIG, developing and managing systems, solutions and other tools to optimize that work and make it as efficient as possible while maintaining security and integrity of the information and data we were stewards for. My team and myself worked towards smartly modernizing the IG’s operations through appropriate technology applications and optimizing their interactions with the supporting systems and solutions. I always felt a tie to the outcomes realizing that every American resident is touched by a service or benefit administered by HHS, and it was mine and my teams’ responsibilities to support weeding out possible waste, fraud and abuse.

Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries – yep.

Medical research and grants – yep.

Global disease control and prevention – sure thing.

Refugee resettlement – of course.

Ensuring deadbeat parents pay child support – surprising, but yes.

Elderly care facilities – you betcha.

Safe food, medications, and medical devices – why not.

There’s so much that just one agency does, but that’s just one portion of services Federal agencies provide. So, if you extrapolate out, it’s large and complex and is a challenge to manage and even resource properly even under the best situation and scenarios. Under reduced staffing mandates, recission of budgets due to sequestration, and of course politics, doing all of this properly and comprehensively is difficult.

With this all being said. All the staff, expertise, scopes and scale – it’s hard to believe that any honesty is coming out of the DOGE teams that have been unleashed on agencies and their systems. Even if it’s been recently memed, if you were to root out waste, fraud and abuse of government programs, budgets and funding programs – you’d send in accountants instead of tech staff. There’s no amount of crawling file shares, databases, cloud environments and even desktops in the last three weeks that would result in any reliable revelations other than hunting for pre-determined outcomes to suit a political agenda and not look like they were stumbling and bumbling around.

This is not oversight, which you are seeing pitched by DOGE and Elon Musk, you are seeing the massive invasion of privacy of Federal employees, American residents and citizens, and compromising the security and operations of critical systems of the government. Oversight is careful review, analysis and investigation of program operations, and coordination amongst Federal partners and private organizations to weed out malfeasance, not perpetrated it like the afore mentioned teams. Don’t believe the hype, misinformation, and out and out lies. Take it from somebody who was on the inside and did the work that was needed and performed for the task.

If Trump was supporting weeding out waste, fraud and abuse, he wouldn’t have fired nearly every independent inspector general in the Federal government at the end of his first week in office in his second term. The head of the office is the only political appointee in the IG, while everybody else is career staff, to essentially remain non-partisan in its operations. There’s no unelected bureaucratic class as has been espoused by our current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, there’s dedicated citizens who have eschewed higher pay in the private sector to give back to their country by serving.

Of course any could find a private sector job, but if you’ve ever served as a civil servant, it’s addicting to serve the public. You know your work is helping, even if you’re not in oversight. I can say this with experience from my time in other agencies in other roles. Most of the grousing I hear is the lack of predictability of funding for agency work, which throws many departments and offices into disarray on how to sustain their work while Congress often abdicates one of their basic functions of determining and approving an annual budget to fund the government. Don’t be fooled by pontificating elected officials blaming the agencies for creating issues, when most of those issues are derived from the back-and-forth discourse over alignment of administration or party priorities.

There’s no amount of judicious application of teenage programmers and technology, including AI, that is going to find anything now or in the future other than act as an avenue to siphon off sensitive information. If it was so easy, it would have already happened. Folks who delivered and operated and secured technology in these agencies already work to protect it, treat it with care and respect, and ensure that it is used to deliver citizen and public services, at home and abroad without respect to pre-conditions of a certain belief, ethic, gender, race, orientation, socio-economic status, age or even political viewpoint.

Please, if there’s anything I can implore is to listen to the folks who’ve been doing the work. The public trust was broken by politicians and not civil servants, using them as a pawn like two divorced parents to try to make their points. Urge your elected representatives to demand restoration of the inspector generals that were dismissed unceremoniously. Educate those who may be disbelieving that there has been an effective function to protect American’s investments that isn’t entitled DOGE and is stealing their data via violating a litany of laws, regulations, policies and practices. Don’t believe the hype and lies. Consider their source, and consider their behavior – they aren’t doing it in your best interest, they are doing it in theirs.