Despite firings, acting IG says it’s 'the best time to be in the inspector general community' due to focus on fraud

The work of inspectors general to detect and prevent scams has become increasingly important as the Trump administration prioritizes combating fraud in government programs, a panel of the agency watchdogs said Wednesday during a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by AGA, formerly known as the Association of Government Accountants. 

“This is probably the best time to be in the inspector general community, where there's the renewed focus on fraud, waste and abuse,” said acting Education Department inspector general Mark Priebe. 

Even so, members of the audience did ask about the president’s unprecedented firing last year of nearly 20 IGs and whether that is impacting their oversight work. Priebe said that he’s not concerned. 

“If a new administration comes in and says we want all of our own IGs, that's fine,” he said. “I really think that the executive branch should have some say over their policies and their procedures and how they enact that.” 

Government Executive has reported that Priebe, who previously served as a senior official in the Education IG, appears to have shared social media posts supporting Trump. While IGs are political appointees, they’ve historically served across administrations. Experts have warned that replacing them each time there’s a transfer of power would weaken independent government oversight.

Still, Priebe said that the Trump administration’s push to dismantle the Education Department, which has resulted in the halving of the agency’s workforce, is affecting his IG office. 

“We're losing agents and auditors because they're not sure what's going to happen,” he said. “So that's an additional area that we're concerned with — to have a staff and to be able to check the department and go out into the public and fight fraud.” 

Based on federal workforce data, Education’s IG office has gone from more than 200 staffers in 2024 to nearly 150 currently. 

The IGs on the panel also discussed the challenges of detecting fraud as technology advances. 

For example, Fara Damelin, the inspector general of the Federal Communications Commission, said that analyzing metadata is an integral method to verifying the authenticity of a document. 

“That's why the government needs to get smarter and use all the technology out there,” she said. 

But Priebe warned, based on a recent summit he attended, that fraudsters are figuring out ways to modify metadata. 

The watchdogs also said that IG offices are attempting to move away from investigating fraud after it happens and instead prioritize stopping scams before they occur. Kenneth Dieffenbach — the executive director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which oversees COVID-19 and One Big Beautiful Bill Act spending — described it as going from a “pay and chase” to a “prevent and relax” model. 

“Sometimes when we start an audit or an engagement with our agency, they're like, ‘Well, you can't look at that right now. We're still implementing this program,’” added Eric Rivera, the assistant IG for Audits at the Export-Import Bank OIG. “But we want to look at it right now so we can give them real-time feedback.” 

House Republicans recently passed, with some Democratic support, a bill that would establish an IG office within the Treasury Department to counter fraud in programs that provide funding to non-federal entities.