Oversight diminished: Federal watchdogs are conducting less oversight as their staffs shrink

Under the second Trump administration, offices of inspectors general in Cabinet departments are completing fewer audits and fewer investigations, leaving federal agencies and taxpayers more vulnerable to the waste, fraud and abuse that inspectors general were created to prevent.

This decline comes as the administration has spent 18 months shedding federal employees and senior career leaders across government, straining agencies’ ability to run programs effectively. With fewer staff and less experienced leadership, agencies are increasingly unable to carry out core functions in areas from education to public health to disaster relief, and more prone to error in the work they do perform. Independent oversight exists to catch and facilitate a response to exactly those failures, yet it is contracting at the moment agencies most need it.

Our analysis of Cabinet-department OIG semiannual reports and Office of Personnel Management data reveals a clear pattern:

• OIGs are conducting less oversight: Cabinet department OIGs issued 6% fewer audit reports and 25% fewer investigative reports on average in the first half of fiscal year 2026 compared to the average in 2020-2024. Four departments issued at least 30% fewer audit reports, and five departments issued at least 30% fewer investigative reports.
• Beyond diminished activity, Cabinet department OIGs took twice as long to release their semiannual reports on average in the second half of fiscal year 2025, creating gaps in transparency and limiting feedback loops between OIGs, policymakers and appropriators.
• Further reduced oversight activity can be expected as the average Cabinet department OIG now has a staff that is more than 19% smaller than it was in December of 2024. Three department OIGs have a staff that is at least 25% smaller.

President Donald Trump spent his first year removing inspectors general and shrinking the offices they lead. The results are now visible in what those offices produce.

Cabinet department OIGs are issuing fewer audits and investigations

Inspector general offices are one of the federal government’s most important internal watchdogs, conducting audits and investigations that save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year.

Every six months, OIGs must report to Congress and the public on what their office has done. The law sets the contents: the audit, inspection and evaluation reports issued during the period and metrics on prosecutorial referrals. The reports also describe the significant problems the office found at the agency, the recommendations it made in response and which prior recommendations have not been implemented.

Audits are central to the work of OIGs. An audit is a structured review of an agency program or operation: whether it complies with the law, whether its internal controls function and whether it achieves what it was funded to achieve. Auditors gather and document evidence against those criteria, and the resulting audit report lays out what they found and what the agency should do about it. The report goes to the agency which must issue a formal decision on each finding.

Ten Cabinet departments issued fewer audit reports in the first half of fiscal year 2026 than they averaged from 2020 to 2024, and four of them published at least 30% fewer. The Department of Education OIG issued 66% fewer audit reports despite the need for increased oversight as departmental staffing cuts have cast doubt on the agency’s ability to carry out statutorily required internal monitoring responsibilities. Three departments issued more, holding the average to 6%.

Investigations are the other half of an OIG’s work. Where an audit examines a program, an investigation follows up on credible hotline tips, requests or referrals to examine a person — an employee, contractor or grantee — alleged to have engaged in misconduct, such as fraud, ethics violations or abuses of authority. Investigators gather evidence and the resulting investigative report sets out the facts and whether the allegations were substantiated, and it goes to the agency for action or, where there are reasonable grounds to believe a federal criminal law was violated, directly to the Department of Justice.

The decline in investigative reports is steeper and more consistent. Eight of 11 Cabinet departments issued fewer investigative reports than their 2020-2024 average, five of them at least 30% fewer. The Department of Housing and Urban Development OIG saw the biggest decrease at 59% fewer reports. The average department issued 25% fewer — over four times the drop in audit reports.

These figures track counts, not content — a report is a report whether it examines a department-wide program or a single facility. However, there is little reason to think these offices are producing fewer, more ambitious reports than what the office has historically produced.

Every report that did not happen represents oversight that did not occur. An audit not conducted means a program went unexamined — no findings, no recommendations and no formal decision the agency must make and answer for. An investigation not opened means an allegation went unresolved and lost taxpayer dollars were never recovered. In the second half of fiscal year 2024 alone, before the decline in oversight activity, investigative teams in the four OIGs with the greatest reporting decreases reported 200 arrests, 189 convictions and $155 million saved or recovered because of their work. That is what investigative work produces. Cases that are never opened produce none of these results.

Inspectors general are the mechanism by which the executive branch examines itself, and the volume of that examination has declined sharply in a single year. The result is not a leaner oversight operation. It is agencies with less scrutiny of their programs and their personnel, and less information for the Department of Justice and Congress to work off as they consider their own oversight and actions.

Semiannual reports are reaching the public more slowly

The public is also getting access to semiannual reports more slowly. Reports covering the second half of fiscal year 2025 took 106 days from the end of the period to become public compared to an average of 53 days from 2020 to 2024.

Responsibility for releasing semiannual reports to Congress and the public is split between inspectors general and their respective agency heads. The inspector general must furnish the report to the agency leader by April 30 or October 31. The agency head then has 30 days to transmit it to Congress and 60 more days to make it available to the public. A report that reaches the public late could mean the OIG needed longer to finish it. It could also mean the agency’s leadership sat on it.

Neither explanation is reassuring. The first says these offices have diminished capacity to release the report in a timely manner. The second says agencies are delaying the release of reports they are forbidden to edit. In either case, the public — including oversight groups and the media — is losing vital insight into how federal agencies are using taxpayer dollars and executive branch leaders are carrying out their duties during a time when there are growing concerns about government transparency and wastefulness.

Reporting delays returned to historical norms in the most recent period, but there remains cause for concern. The Department of Health and Human Services took over three months (101 days) to release its most recent report, roughly double the five-year average. The Department of Homeland Security’s report covering the second half of fiscal year 2025 took nine months to reach the public, roughly five months past what the law allows. Its report for the period ending in March 2026 also has not been released. Notably, DHS OIG semiannual reports are being delayed during a time when there are significant concerns about agency interference with OIG investigations and how it is using its drastically increased budget.

The delays are not only a clerical mishap. Delays hamper transparency into what these offices are doing — and into the operations of the agencies and personnel they oversee. The semiannual report is the vehicle for that information: the problems the office found, the recommendations it made and which recommendations the agency still has not implemented.

OIG staffing has fallen faster than the administration projected

OIGs have experienced significant disruption since the beginning of the Trump administration that may be driving the diminished output: the president’s firing of 11 of 13 Cabinet department inspectors general, the installment of inspectors general with political ties to the president, the unprecedented placement of non-Senate confirmed appointees in OIGs and the attempts to undermine OIGs through budget and staffing reductions.

One of the areas with the most concrete evidence is staffing. Our previous analysis found that Cabinet department OIGs had reduced their staff by 10% as of their fiscal 2027 budget proposal and projected an additional 9% staffing reduction by the end of the fiscal year.

Recent data released by the Office of Personnel Management shows that the administration has already reached the staffing levels it projected for the end of fiscal year 2027. As of May 31, the average Cabinet department OIG staff was 19% smaller than in December 2024.

The three OIGs with the deepest staffing cuts — Treasury (−31%), Education (−28%) and HUD (−25%) — are also the three with the steepest declines in investigative reports, at 55%, 54% and 59% fewer, respectively. Investigations are mostly discretionary, left to the OIG’s judgment as to which are necessary or desirable. When an office loses a quarter of its staff, the discretionary work is the first to go.

Congress must act to preserve independent oversight

Despite the administration stating that it wants the federal government to be more efficient and accountable, they have clearly and successfully undermined one of the government’s most important sources of independent oversight.

Fraud prevention has garnered significant attention in Congress in recent months. In a single week in June 2026, the House passed 11 Committee on Oversight and Government Reform bills designed to save taxpayer dollars by curbing fraud in federal programs. Congress should further its recent prioritization of fraud prevention by protecting OIGs and the critical oversight work they undertake to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.

Congress has pushed back before, declining to cut OIG funding on average since fiscal year 2024 despite repeated requests from the Trump administration. It should do so again in this year’s appropriations while pressing the administration to account for unprecedented declines in oversight activity, staffing reductions that have already outpaced fiscal year 2027 projections and semiannual reports that are reaching Congress and the public more slowly than at any point in the past six years.

Reform is needed to make inspectors general — and federal oversight more broadly — more effective. But dismantling these offices is not reform. Through the Partnership’s Government for a New Era initiative, we are working with stakeholders across government to develop proposals that strengthen independent oversight rather than diminish it.

Learn more about the Government for a New Era initiative, our effort to develop reforms for a more effective, responsive and accountable government.

Authors: Jaron León and Chris Piper