“Friday night was the danger zone” (1-on-1 with Fired Inspector General Mark Greenblatt)

Talking Feds

Harry Litman

Election, Government, January 6, Politics, Merrick Garland, Law, Harry Litman, Trump, News, Legal

4.8 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Harry talks with Mark Greenblatt, one of the Inspectors General fired suddenly in the “Friday night purge” of the vast majority of Senate-confirmed IG’s. They discuss the origin, function, and nature of Inspectors General, who have saved taxpayers nearly $700 billion. Greenblatt talks about his own 20-year + service in the IG community, during which he rotated through several agencies and was elected by his peers to lead the IGs’ council. Then they zero in on Friday night and exactly what happened before moving to Greenblatt’s current thoughts about how the IG community, Congress, and country should respond to the purge, and whether and how it is possible to safeguard the paramount goal of oversight with integrity and credibility. It’s the longest and most detailed and nuance discussion with any of the fired IGs, going well beyond quick sound bites to an in-depth examination of who IGs are and what the country has lost in the purge.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Talking Fed's One-on-One, One, Deep Dive Discussions with National Figures
0:12.3	about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives.
0:19.8	I'm your host, Harry Littman.
0:22.5	Welcome to a very special talking feds one-on-one. As you've likely heard, the new
0:28.0	administration capped off a week of harrowing assaults on U.S. democracy and the rule of law
0:34.5	with an unpublicized firings of 17, we think.
0:40.4	It's not even clear.
0:41.6	There's been no publicity in what's being called already, the Friday night purge.
0:48.8	But we are really fortunate to have one of the IGs with us. Mark Greenblatt is the Inspector General for the
0:57.6	Department of Interior, where he oversees a staff of 300 to investigate all manner of misconduct
1:05.6	among the 70,000 employees of the Department of Interior. He's been in the field of Inspector General
1:14.1	Oversight for some 20 years, has served as the chair of the Council of the Consortium
1:21.0	Inspectors General and Inspectors General on Integrity. And so is a really perfect person to talk to us.
1:29.9	And this may be, it's the first or one of the first public statements by any of the fired
1:36.6	IG, so we're really fortunate to bring it to you. Mark, thanks so much for joining.
1:43.8	Well, thank you so much for having me on and
1:45.9	I'm looking forward to a good conversation. Okay. Let's start with this whole concept of an
1:51.6	inspector general besides its kind of slightly arcane name. You know, people don't know that
1:58.7	much about it. They are watchdogs of a sort, but within the
2:03.2	individual agencies and a sort of creature of an important 1978 statute, parts of a lot of reforms
2:12.2	there. Can you just give us the basic of, you know, who are the inspectors general?
2:21.4	Yeah, so we are, as you said, the internal watchdogs inside every federal agency. There are 73 of us, and what we do is we do audits,
	...

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