Just how corrupt is the government, anyway?

Former Inspector General Glenn Fine stopped by the studio the other day to talk about IG work and Watchdogs, his book on it. I asked him, after having stints at two large departments, whether he thought the government is corrupt.

Fine served 11 years as Inspector General at the Justice Department. He left government and came back for five years as acting IG of the Defense Department. Five years as acting sounds like a record. No one else occupied the Defense IG chair, acting or confirmed, for that long. Fine feels, as I do, that the U.S. federal government is essentially honest — which doesn’t mean corruption never occurs.

But what exactly is “corruption?” That’s a little more complicated than it sounds. I see it as taking several potential forms. They’ve all happened. Whether the government is actually corrupt, then, is not a matter of whether corruption — in an organization of 3 million people — never takes place. Every organization is fallible to the extent people are fallible. The question is, rather, whether such occurrences are the norm or the exception. Put another way: How does the organization react at the occurrence of corrupt conduct by individuals?

Here are the basic forms, which I state as an observer, not a lawyer:

• Clear-cut corruption like acceptance of bribes or giving contracts to friends for kickbacks. For Fine, the outstanding example was the so-called Fat Leonard fiasco. In the biggest scandal in Navy history, high- and low-level 7th Fleet officers accepted money, dinners and hookers from a Malaysian purveyor of ship husbanding services. The episode spawned books and Wikipedia pages.  This type of thing raises the questions of what training, cultural and operational lapses led to this? Where were the countersigners?
• Petty daily corruption like having a palm out in exchange for a passport or fishing license. This is, to my knowledge, largely unknown at the federal level. The FBI has a special unit to root out this type of corruption at the state and local level.
• Subtle corruption like enhancing a secret political agenda, selectively enforcing laws, or far outrunning the intent of a law with excessive rule-making, perhaps because of a personal belief. Suppressing honest staff work when facts don’t square with politics is another form.

Sensitivity to this form of corruption has intensified as the nation has seemingly gone bipolar, politically speaking. For example, alleged “lawfare” against former President Trump has given rise to the opinion that the Justice Department has become politicized.  If it has, it’s hard to measure and quantify, like Fat Leonard. But the potential corrodes trust in government. Erosion of trust has many harmful effects — among them, a rise in threats against government people and facilities.

Savvy leaders remain vigilant against these potentials, especially when (un)social media seems to have normalized much abhorrent behavior.

A case in point: Just yesterday, a clamp-jawed and unblinking Attorney General Merrick Garland appeared visibly upset at threats against the Justice Department and other federal officials. He held a stern and, frankly, impassioned communion with a televised staff meeting. He cited section 9-27.260 of the Principles of Federal Prosecution. It specifies, and Garland quoted, this impermissible consideration for initiating prosecution: “The person’s race, religion, gender, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, or political association, activities, or beliefs.”

It also states that prosecutors may neither initiate prosecutions nor select their timing “for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

Garland told the assembly that Justice operatives won’t work as “an apparatus of politics” and that DOJ employees “don’t bend to politics.” Both lines got spontaneous and enthusiastic applause. Garland quoted the preamble to the Principles:  “…the success of that system must rely ultimately on the character, integrity, sensitivity, and competence of those men and women” entrusted to do the work.

Garland’s DOJ is the object of a political tug-of-war, on which I’ll leave others to pontificate. They’re dreary, but this kind of thing happens in spite of agencies having publicly available north stars like the Principles of Federal Prosecution. Charges of “weaponization” fly about. Both “weaponization” and perceptions of it are dangerous. Garland was forced to say that the DOJ doesn’t have “one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans.”

At last night’s Service to America Medals awards program, the audience similarly applauded the emcee’s reference to the non-partisan nature of the awardees and the way they did their work. The Sammies are indeed a testament to people with “character, integrity, sensitivity, and competence.”

In one of my personal favorite Sammies interviews, Mine Safety and Health Administration researcher Chris Mark described a life of discovering causes of mine roof collapse and ways to prevent them.

In another, a Labor Department team hunted down and stopped the use of child labor in a meat processing plan, exacting a big settlement from the plant’s sanitation contractor. Their work is like a wasp colony. The capture of one led to the realization that thousands more cases are right behind it.

Glenn Fine’s conclusion is that the government suffers from bad actors from time to time, but, at the core, most employees are honest and motived to help the country. He noted that the U.S. federal system of oversight is regularly examined as a model by other nations. He might have added, our rule-making processes and our procurement system — however aware we might be of their imperfections — also invite examination by other nations as models for how to conduct public administration.

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