Trump Is Aligning with Nixon on Transparency

Donald Trump is taking the government back to pre-Nixon days by virtue of terminating accountability mechanisms that actually root out waste, fraud and abuse.

Why would a president seek to defund independent government oversight, hide watchdog reports, and hotlines to report waste, fraud and abuse?

After all, Donald Trump and his oligarchy buddy (both of whom appear in the Epstein files although we don’t know in what capacity) slashed through the federal government making cuts and firing people in the name of “waste, fraud and abuse.”

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But it seems they aren’t actually interested in letting anyone else determine what qualifies as waste, fraud and abuse, even though they clearly aren’t qualified as hundreds of people they fired have had to be rehired and approximately 25,000 federal workers fired by the Trump administration under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been ordered reinstated by federal judges, costing the taxpayers untold millions.

Indeed, the White House Office of Management and Budget is withholding funds from the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, or CIGIE, which handles all kinds of independent oversight.

“Due to a lack of apportionment of funds, this website is currently unavailable” the website reads. And no, it is not shuttered due to the *other* government disaster of Trump’s government shutdown. This is a separate disaster.

“It also runs Oversight.gov, which houses over 34,000 reports from most of the 70 plus OIGs, and operates 28 OIG websites that house legally required hotlines for whistleblowers to report suspected cases of government waste, fraud and abuse,” NextGov pointed out.

The point of shuttering CIGIE is perhaps to do what former executive director of CIGIE and former Inspector General for the Interior Department Mark Greenblatt warns it will do, “Shuttering CIGIE will eviscerate transparency in our federal government.”

Donald Trump has been accused of taking the federal government back to pre-Nixon days by virtue of canceling accountability mechanisms within the government that actually root out waste, fraud and abuse.