Updated, 6:45 p.m.
At least 15 government oversight websites were down — and with them, access to watchdog reports and required hotline and whistleblower links — as of Wednesday evening. That’s not due to the federal shutdown that began at midnight; it’s a deliberate move by the White House, whose Office of Management and Budget is withholding funds from the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, or CIGIE.
The CIGIE’s homepage, which was operating normally on Tuesday evening, has been replaced with a single line of text: “Due to a lack of apportionment of funds, this website is currently unavailable.”
The same line is displayed by the Office of Inspector General websites for the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Justice, Interior and Veterans Affairs, and by those of AmeriCorps, Export-Import Bank of the United States, Federal Trade Commission, International Trade Commission, National Archives and Records Administration, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Personnel Management, Smithsonian Institution, and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
The watchdog website for the National Labor Relations Board’s OIG page gives a 404 error. The Architect of the Capitol’s IG page says “Not found”; a new page offers only hotline information and blames the change on a “funding issue impacting Oversight.gov functions.”
CIGIE is an independent entity charged by Congress with addressing oversight issues that involve more than one government agency. It provides training for investigators and auditors and acts as a watchdog for the government watchdog community.
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. That site is also down.
Asked about the decision, an OMB spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW in a statement that “inspectors general are meant to be impartial watchdogs identifying waste and corruption on behalf of the American people. Unfortunately, they have become corrupt, partisan, and in some cases, have lied to the public.”
The move drew immediate criticism from lawmakers, former watchdog officials, and others.
“Shuttering CIGIE will eviscerate transparency in our federal government,” Mark Greenblatt, former chair of CIGIE and former Inspector General for the Interior Department, said in a Tuesday statement.
CIGIE didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
With the websites gone, so is access to the reports of those offices as well as links for whistleblowers. Some of the affected OIG offices have posted to social media to offer phone numbers and alternative online hotline complaint forms.
CIGIE warned lawmakers in a letter Saturday that OMB had made a “policy decision” to not apportion funding for fiscal year 2026 for CIGIE, which is primarily funded in a no-year revolving account that member OIGs contribute to, so CIGIE isn’t affected by government shutdowns like the one that began at midnight.
Some Republicans have pushed back on the move.
Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Senate Judiciary chair, wrote to OMB Monday asking the White House office “to promptly reverse course so that CIGIE and PRAC can continue their important oversight work uninterrupted.”
Tammy Hull, the acting chair of CIGIE and current OIG for the U.S. Postal Service, warned lawmakers in the Saturday letter that OMB’s decision will also interrupt the work of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which “relies on CIGIE for IT infrastructure and security, personnel, and contracting support, among other services.”
Congress recently extended the authorization of that committee through 2034 in the administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Linda Miller, president and co-founder of the Program Integrity Alliance, told Nextgov/FCW in a statement that her biggest concern is “whether defunding CIGIE is a harbinger of what’s to come with the inspector generals offices themselves.”
“If the administration plans to reduce or eliminate the role of the inspectors general, I think we all should be very concerned about integrity in the federal government. We don’t want to go back to the way things were pre-Watergate, when agency leaders didn’t have the accountability mechanisms in place that they do today,” Miller said.
This is the latest Trump-administration move against the watchdog community. Shortly after the president took office, he fired nearly 20 inspectors general, a move that a federal judge recently said was an “obvious” violation of the law.
Just yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a review of the reporting processes for Defense Department’s IG, which is currently investigating him for allegedly using an unsecure, unapproved app to conduct official business in the form of sending strike plans over Signal.
The Trump administration has said that a top priority is fighting fraud, waste, and abuse—the very purview of inspectors general.
“None of this makes any sense,” Jenny Rone, former deputy inspector general for the Department of Agriculture until early this year, told Nextgov/FCW. “If that’s what the administration priorities are, the people that have been doing this since 1978 are the ones that should be relied on.”
“Undermining whistleblower protections is a hallmark of authoritarian systems and a direct threat to checks and balances,” said Faith Williams, director of the effective and accountable government program at the Project on Government Oversight, in a statement.
