A Zealous Watchman to Follow the Money

[Emit]

March 10, 2009
A Zealous Watchman to Follow the Money
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — There is an alligator head in Earl E. Devaney’s office, with a tiny camera concealed inside. The covert pictures it snapped in a Louisiana bayou caught an Interior Department official on a fishing trip he had accepted as a bribe, but today the stuffed gator lives on as a toothy deterrent to corruption.

“When an assistant secretary comes in and asks about it, I tell that story and they get a little unnerved,” said Mr. Devaney, the inspector general for the Interior Department and the man President Obama has chosen to police the spending of the $787 billion stimulus package.

In 38 years of government service, Mr. Devaney, a hulking former college football lineman and Secret Service man, has been unnerving would-be miscreants. But now the Big Man, as Mr. Devaney’s colleagues call him, is taking on an incomparably bigger job, tracking a sum 50 times the agency’s annual budget as chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board — or as the irresistible acronym has it, RAT Board.

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“It’s sort of the Super Bowl of oversight,” said Mr. Devaney, 61, in an interview between hunting for office space and recruiting staff members. He has $84 million to run his office through September 2011, out of some $350 million for oversight.

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“He’s out of central casting as the old-time street cop who’s seen it all,” said Danielle Brian, executive director for the Project on Government Oversight, an advocacy group in Washington. Unlike inspectors general who soft-pedal criticism of agency brass, Ms. Brian added, Mr. Devaney “never got the memo that said he wasn’t supposed to be a junkyard dog.”

The job, however, comes with a glaring contradiction. Speedy spending is considered critical to jump-starting the economy. Still, Mr. Devaney must make sure the billions shoveled out the Treasury door in such a hurry are neither wasted nor stolen. He said he was aware of the tension and hoped to deter waste and fraud not with an alligator head, but with a Web site, Recovery.gov, with voluminous details on every dollar spent.

“I want to make it possible for Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Ohio to see exactly how the money is spent,” Mr. Devaney said. If a project that promised to create 1,000 jobs only creates 100, the failure will be recorded, he said: “The good, the bad and the ugly will all be on that Web site.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/us/politics/10devaney.html?th&emc=th