Inspector General Empowerment Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, today, the Senate passed the Inspector General Empowerment Act. This is a crucial piece of legislation to enable inspectors general to function independently and to weed out waste, fraud, and abuse within the government. I thank Senator McCain for working with me constructively to resolve the concerns he raised last week and for honoring the agreement we made in December 2015.

Following Senator McCain's objection to my attempt to pass the IG bill by a live UC last Thursday, our staffs met and reached a compromise. We agreed to remove some provisions of the bill related to IG leave policy and IG reporting requirements. Although we disagreed on those provisions, I am glad that we agreed to preserve the most important parts of the bill.

Namely, we preserved the provisions of the bill that provide inspectors general with timely access to all records of the agency that they are charged with overseeing. In addition, the bill contains numerous other provisions that strengthen IG independence and equip Igs with the necessary tools to weed out waste, fraud, and abuse within the Federal Government.

The bill requires the Government Accountability Office to conduct a study on prolonged IG vacancies and to provide recommendations for reducing these vacancies. It exempts Igs from getting computer matching agreements and from complying with the Paperwork Reduction Act, in order to ensure that Igs can obtain information and perform investigations without first obtaining agency approval. It improves the process by which Igs police the conduct of other Igs, to require that investigations are conducted in a more timely fashion. It promotes greater transparency by requiring Igs to report to Congress semiannually on impediments to their work, such as agency interference, reports that are not made otherwise available to the public, and whistleblower retaliation. Finally, it requires Igs to send IG recommendations to the heads of agencies and to Congress and to publicly post reports, unless otherwise prohibited by law.

It is a waste of time and money to have agencies at war with their inspectors general over access to information. The inspectors general need to spend their time identifying and helping agencies eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse--not fighting for access to the information needed to do their job. The bureaucrats need to learn Congress intended for the law to mean exactly what it says.

Unless a provision of law specifically mentions the inspector general and prevents access to certain kinds of documents, then those records should be provided. ``All records'' means ``all records.''

I thank my cosponsors who worked diligently with me over the past year-and-a-half to help this bill pass in the Senate.

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