A Zealous Watchman to Follow the Money
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.
Squeezed with other honorees into the box of the first lady, Michelle Obama, for the president’s address to Congress on Feb. 24, Mr. Devaney looked uneasy in the spotlight, a deadpan Joe Friday at a political spectacle. But he likes the assignment.
“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.
The stimulus is a bet-the-farm wager on the economy with few precedents in American history, and Mr. Devaney’s appointment has been widely praised for assuring tough scrutiny.
“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.”
Not all believe the federal government is capable of such candor, and so far, an independent site, StimulusWatch.org, easily outclasses Recovery.gov. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, called Mr. Devaney “independent and highly effective” but said the RAT board “puts another layer of bureaucracy between taxpayers and the truth” about how the money is spent.
The only child of a middle-class couple in Reading, Mass., Mr. Devaney studied government at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. The quarterback he helped protect, D. J. Korns, recalls Mr. Devaney’s steady leadership in a fraternity and stoicism on the football field, where his bad shoulder would pop out of joint, a trainer would snap it back in, and he would return to the fray. “It was so painful I couldn’t watch,” Mr. Korns said.
Hooked on law enforcement after working summers as a police officer on Cape Cod, Mr. Devaney went directly from graduation to the Secret Service in 1970. He protected presidents — he liked the recent film “Frost/Nixon” for its portrait of that president — and once was shot at by a disturbed woman who mistook him for President Gerald R. Ford. She missed, and he went on to build a new fraud division in the Secret Service.
In 1991, he was hired to create a criminal enforcement division for the Environmental Protection Agency. Felicia Marcus, who worked with him as a regional administrator at that agency in the 1990s — and whom he once saved from a purse-snatcher — said he was tough but reasonable with polluters.
“He listens, but no one pushes this guy around,” Ms. Marcus said.
Arriving at the Interior Department in 1999, Mr. Devaney found a “broken” inspector general’s office, said Mary Kendall, his deputy there. Senior officials told him they had never before met any of his predecessors and that they threw out reports unread because they were so dense.
Mr. Devaney created a special unit to focus on the most serious cases, which had routinely languished, created a system for identifying the programs at highest risk of failure, and ordered that reports no longer be written in “auditese or cop talk,” as he called it. When programs worked, he praised them, to build trust with the work force.
The 2004 investigation of the official photographed in the bayou, a Louisiana regional supervisor who accepted fishing trips from a contractor, was one in a parade of Interior Department scandals involving drugs and sex, free-spending lobbyists and unpaid oil royalties. Mr. Devaney speaks of his beat at the department with a mix of relish and dismay.
“Everything everyone would want is here,” he said. “Water, land, minerals, oil and gas and the ever-popular Indian gaming.”
The job has proved frustrating at times. In 2004, his first report on J. Steven Griles, the deputy secretary who was close to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, documented 25 ethical lapses, he said. But the interior secretary, Gale A. Norton, shrugged it off.
“She said she’d talked to him, and he wouldn’t do it again,” Mr. Devaney said. “Three years later, he was in jail.” (Ms. Norton, now at the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, declined to comment.)
That frustration was on display at a 2006 hearing when Mr. Devaney declared, “Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior.”
Jeff Ruch, who runs the whistle-blower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, is a rare critic, calling Mr. Devaney “the deflector general” for emphasizing sensational corruption cases over more fundamental change.
But Ms. Brian of the Project on Government Oversight said a little showmanship was useful. “He’s figured out that a lot of his impact is deterrence, and that means making a splash,” she said.
Nearly three years ago, Mr. Devaney told Federal Times in a rare interview that he was “in the fall of my career” and had “no aspirations other than to play more golf.” Now, contemplating the stimulus job, he said that was a miscalculation.
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