Consider Earl Devaney a one-man corruption buster.
His probe of Jack Abramoff’s influence-peddling at the U.S. Interior Department several years ago led the agency’s No.2 official - then-Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles - to plead guilty to lying to Congress.
Most recently, Devaney, the Interior Department’s inspector general, created apoplexy at the agency when he blasted officials responsible for granting offshore oil leases, accusing them of accepting gifts, steering contracts to favored clients and engaging in drugs and sex with oil company employees as part of what he described as a broader “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity.”
Now the man described by the New York Times as “the busiest gumshoe inside the federal bureaucracy” has been tapped by President Barack Obama to oversee spending of the $787 billion stimulus package.
If anyone is up to the Herculean task of demanding accountability about how billions of taxpayer dollars are spent, it would be this burly and blunt-spoken former fraud investigator for the Secret Service.
Obama named Devaney to head the White House’s Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board on the same day that he held a Fiscal Responsibility Summit at the White House, apparently attempting to send the message that he can be vigilant about how the government pumps unprecedented sums of money into the economy.
Vice President “Joe [Biden] and I can’t think of a more tenacious and efficient guardian of the hard-earned tax dollars the American people have entrusted us to wisely invest,” he said in a statement.
Obama also noted that Biden would help oversee the plan, meeting regularly with Cabinet officials, governors and mayors to make sure their efforts are “speedy and effective,” and reporting back to him regularly.
For Devaney, who spent more than 20 years with the Secret Service, retiring in 1991 as the Special Agent-in-Charge of the Fraud Division with a reputation as an expert in white-collar crime, this assignment is likely to challenge his smarts and political independence like no other.
After a stint directing criminal enforcement for the U.S. Environment Protection Agency, he was appointed inspector general of the Interior Department in 1999. In his role as nonpartisan watchdog reporting to Congress, he has relentlessly documented corruption, conflicts of interest and other ethics and management issues.
“If you want to be popular, the IG job is not the one to have,” he told Government Executive magazine in 2007. “Every day someone is going to be mad at you. The trick is to come to work in the morning and not be a poodle or a Doberman pinscher, but to strike a balance.”
In addition to the guilty plea by Griles stemming from Devaney’s investigation into Abramoff’s dealings, Italia Federici, co-founder of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, and former Interior Department official Roger Stillwell also pleaded guilty to charges in connection to Abramoff.
Devaney’s appointment was lauded yesterday by several watchdog groups, including The Project on Government Oversight, which has been critical of the Obama administration on transparency issues.
“The ‘Big Guy,’ as [Devaney] is known around IG circles, is no typical Washington insider,” they said. “He still maintains POGO’s favorite emotion - outrage - when there is misconduct in the handling of federal funds.”
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1 Comments
#1. Kevin Nixon 02.25.2009
The use of the term ‘bureaucracy’ is not always fully understood. Bureaucracy is the system of management and control we choose to use; we normally perceive this as a management hierarchy which we take for granted like a fish does water. All organisations exist to deliver a given purpose and bring together interactive resources to secure the functions that enable it to do so. The alternative to bureaucracy is a management hierarchy based on the enabling functional structure and the intrinsic interaction of resources which are clear to everyone.
The backscratching that goes with bureaucracy is not unavoidable because managers have to try to get things done through a management system that is not output friendly. Certain individuals use this characteristic of the obscurity of the system to feather they own nests. The key rests in replacing the system but to do that we need first to debate and accept the inadequacies of bureaucracy.
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