Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas has a plan for a new government-wide inspector general to focus specifically on fighting fraud.
Democrats in Congress are lined up against the GOP bill, known as the Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act.
It would create the new fraud IG in the Treasury Department, essentially assuming the responsibilities and resources of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, or PRAC, that started in 2020 to monitor spending related to COVID-19 relief programs.
The new IG would assist individual agency inspectors general in detecting and mitigating fraud in federal awards over $50,000.
When it passed the House in June in a mostly party-line vote, Mr. Sessions called his bill “the first salvo of Congress’s defense against fraudsters who seek to steal the federal benefits of the most vulnerable of American citizens.”
The bill is likely dead in the Senate.
Democrats warn it is a Trojan horse designed to weaken the government’s existing watchdog system, which they say President Trump has been dismantling.
“You can’t say you want to fight fraud when you literally shut down the fraud fighters,” Rep. James Walkinshaw, Virginia Democrat, said at a hearing on the Sessions bill.
Mr. Trump fired many IGs at the start of the term. He also made rooting out fraud a top priority.
At a recent Cabinet meeting, Vice President J.D. Vance said the administration’s Fraud Task Force has identified $230 billion of fraud being perpetrated against American taxpayers and has halted $56 billion of that from being disbursed.
Last year, Congress extended PRAC’s sunset date to 2034 and expanded its jurisdiction, but the committee and its analytics center are not permanent or government-wide.
Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito told The Washington Times that the Sessions bill largely duplicates existing authorities.
The core purpose of inspectors general is to investigate fraud and work with the Justice Department to prosecute fraud cases, but with agency-specific jurisdiction.
Mr. D’Esposito said Congress should “strengthen the oversight already in place” by shifting PRAC’s data-analytics tools to existing inspectors general.
“We need to put real firepower in the hands of the Inspectors General already hunting down fraudsters,” he said.
Mr. Trump removed at least 21 inspectors general at the beginning of his second term. In March, he launched the Fraud Task Force to coordinate a government-wide strategy to stop waste, fraud and abuse in federal benefit programs.
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