Over the past seventeen months, the United States has given Ukraine almost $113 billion, a sum that will soon surpass the money invested on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II and is rapidly approaching the price of 20 years of war and reconstruction in Afghanistan.
There is no overarching Special Inspector General to oversee the Ukraine funding and weed out waste, fraud, and abuse in spite of this extraordinary spending.
Change may be on the horizon. “There will also be a vote this week,” Rep. Tom Massie, R-Ky., tweeted this morning, on establishing the IG for Ukraine.
Unfortunately, the campaign to establish a Special Inspector General for Ukraine Assistance (SIGUA) has devolved into a partisan issue, becoming yet another victim of the destructive cycle of polarization in Washington, D.C.
Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, tried to create the audit office through an amendment last March.
All Democratic Senators, with the exception of Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Jon Ossoff of Georgia,
voted against the bill, which split the Republican caucus in half.
Unsurprisingly, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) voiced vocal opposition to the office’s creation. Before being elected to the Senate, Warren rose to prominence as an oversight official for the SIGTARP, the auditor of the 2008 bank bailout money. Warren has previously praised SIGTARP for bringing criminal charges against 144 people, obtaining convictions for 107 defendants, and obtaining $4.3 billion in civil judgments and reparations with relatively few investigative resources.
After their accession to power in the 2006 midterm elections, congressional Democrats created the Afghanistan audit office. Press releases from that time period showed how proud the Democratic Party was of its efforts to establish SIGAR. Progressive legislators like Sanders originally promoted SIGAR as a prototype for improved defense department oversight.
On Monday, the Biden administration directed lawmakers to vote against the creation of a SIGUA to oversee Ukraine money. The administration claims that new audit efforts are unnecessary, given that the government already has internal offices devoted to finding waste.
John Sopko, appointed by President Obama to head the SIGAR office for Afghanistan, has criticized the current administration’s position, noting that with such high levels of spending in Ukraine, a “whole of government” special audit office is vital. He also lashed out at officials who argue that new oversight might impede the flow of needed military or recovery assistance.
“Those are statements made by corrupt contractors, corrupt politicians, or politicians and contractors who don’t know anything about effective oversight,” said Sopko, speaking recently to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
The new effort to establish a SIGUA will likely be a recorded vote on an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, the military funding package now before Congress. Lawmakers are using the legislative proposal to tweak a number of Ukraine war issues, including an expected vote to block the Biden administration from supplying illegal cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military, as well as a push to force
the Pentagon to disclose casualty figures for “both sides of the conflict” in Ukraine.
An
updated list of amendments, released this morning from the House Armed Services Committee, suggests that the SIGUA amendment by Roy may be folded into a bloc vote.
I asked the offices of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for comment, over whether they have reconsidered their position on the Ukraine war money audit, but did not get a response.
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