Where is the oversight?
Blocking funding for the Council of IGs is a small pebble in the sea of change but its effects will ripple wide
Today is a heavy day, bringing both a shutdown and the official end of federal service for employees who took the (non-retirement) deferred resignation. Separate from the shutdown, many Offices of Inspector General (OIG) reports across government are unavailable.
Why does this matter?
As we wrote about last week, Inspectors General are among the agencies who serve as America’s referees, making sure we are all playing by the same rules, guarding against those with more money, power, or access being able to “rig the system.”
Congress established OIGs after Watergate to combat corruption by high-ranking government officials, whose power provides ample opportunity for abuse and use of their public positions for personal gain.
OIGs also investigate fraud allegedly committed with federal funds by those inside and outside of government. They conduct audits and other reviews to ensure good use of taxpayer dollars.
What happened?
The administration did not apportion funding for the Council of Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), which provides program and operational support for IGs across the federal government.
Congress created this small agency in 2008. We will be posting more about its origins in the coming weeks, but the most visible impact today is that Inspector General reports for the 28 agencies who depend on CIGIE for website hosting are no longer available. Information provided by or about the Inspectors General, including information on how the public can get in touch with them to alert them to suspected fraud or other misuse of public dollars, is also unavailable.
Many of the 28 OIGs whose websites were hosted by CIGIE show this screen:
In addition to placing a veil over the work of the very agencies established almost 50 years ago to fight fraud, waste, and abuse, refusing to apportion funding to CIGIE could be another example of the executive branch pushing the bounds on Congress’s power of the purse.
Most agencies rely on annual appropriations, passed by Congress, to function. CIGIE receives operational funds from other IGs, who transfer a portion of their annual funding to CIGIE. Any funds remaining at the end of the fiscal year go into a no-year revolving fund. Congress clearly intended for CIGIE to have access to these funds when it established the revolving fund.
Even Republican members of Congress, who have not often questioned the administration’s decisions this year, wrote to Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought asking for details about the decision to withhold funding and plans to reinstate it.
While this seems a little bit of an “inside baseball” technical issue, it’s significant because the administration began the term with a pledge to focus on fighting fraud waste and abuse. As our board member and former Deputy Inspector General for the Department of Agriculture, Jenny Rone, remarked in a news article about the CIGIE funding issue, “none of this makes any sense” because the administration should be relying on “the people that have been doing this since 1978.”
The Program Integrity Alliance (programintegrity.org) has made all OIG reports that were published as of September 30, 2025 available on their website, and For 250 More (for250more.org) created a page listing contact information for OIGs, including how to contact their hotlines and file Freedom of Information Act requests.
This article was updated on 10/3/2025 with information on alternative ways to access information about OIGs and their reports. Additionally, a correction was made to clarify that not all 28 websites hosted by CIGIE are currently down (many appear to have identified alternative hosts).