Three weeks after President Donald Trump’s extraordinary purge of inspectors general across the federal government, a document arrived in Navy Lt. Cmdr. Shannon Bencs’ email inbox.
It was the day before Valentine’s Day, but what was detailed in the 64-page report under the official seal of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense was a relationship gone sideways:
“WHISTLEBLOWER REPRISAL INVESTIGATION, LIEUTENANT COMMANDER SHANNON BENCS, U.S. NAVY, NAVAL SUPPLY FLEET LOGISTICS CENTER,
PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII.”
Bencs had been waiting for nearly four years for the report since filing complaints against her commanders, claiming they had retaliated against her for exposing significant issues before a devastating fuel leak at the Navy’s largest storage facility in 2021 contaminated drinking water for tens of thousands of service members and their families.
But when she scoured the preliminary findings, her heart sank. The DoD inspector general found no link between her whistleblowing and her negative performance reviews.
“It was like a kick in the gut,” Bencs told The War Horse. “I had a feeling that they would protect the Navy.”
While Congress empowered inspectors general with independent oversight to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, critics say what happened to Bencs is typical of a system that is overseen by the agencies that are under the spotlight themselves.
Now, some advocates for greater independence and accountability are asking: Could IG reform really come under Trump?
‘97.6%’ Told ‘No, You’re Liars’
Trump raised alarm with his unprecedented sacking of more than a dozen heads of inspector general offices during his first week back in the White House, including at the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs. A month later, he turned his ax on Pentagon military leaders, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Critics say the housecleaning is simply part of a larger consolidation of power—not a pretext for reform—and that the dramatic downsizing of federal workers under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is fostering an even deeper fear of speaking out. But the leaders of the veteran-run Walk the Talk Foundation are still hoping the president will make good on a campaign promise to “make every inspector general’s office independent and physically separated from the departments they oversee”—a change they say is critical to creating a system whistleblowers can trust.
Walk the Talk founder Ryan Sweazey is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served as an inspector general for an air wing from 2013 to 2016. He says he later found himself subjected to professional reprisal after reporting workplace hostility and discrimination in the Defense Intelligence Agency. Sweazey points to a Congressional Research Service report in 2020 on how infrequently whistleblower reprisal complaints are substantiated: just 2.4% of cases.
“So 97.6% of cases are told, ‘No, you’re liars or you’re wrong, go suck it,’ right?” Sweazey told The War Horse. “It’s an extremely high-risk, low probability of quote-unquote success system.”
Officers named in Bencs’ reprisal report were faulted in the Navy’s separate findings about the handling of the Red Hill fuel leak that sickened thousands in Hawaii. The draft IG report found her commanding officer at the time had motive to retaliate against her, having known about multiple reports she made regarding fuel leaks into Pearl Harbor and a new fire suppression system that had been taken offline.
But the report found actions her senior officers took, including unfavorable fitness reports, and a decision at one point to put Bencs on travel orders, did not adversely affect her career, or were linked to her job performance and not her reporting. The Defense Department's Office of Inspector General did not respond to an interview request, and The War Horse tried to contact Bencs' supervisors but did not hear back.
Bencs was formally fired from her position in May 2021, just days after a pressure surge would eventually cause 19,000 gallons of fuel to seep into the ground near the storage facility.
She says the IG’s interviews with her felt adversarial, seeming to probe for inconsistencies in her story.
“It’s like every time I [talked] to them, they’re just trying to find a way to disprove what I was saying, thinking I didn’t have evidence to support it,” she said.
‘72 Hours of Training’
The Walk the Talk Foundation has created a draft executive order and legislative proposal outlining changes that would make IGs less beholden to the organizations they report on. These include creating an independent inspector general for DoD that does not depend on military command-appointed investigators; more and better training for IG staff; mandatory timelines for completing investigations; and a fast-track process for Freedom of Information Act document requests related to IG investigations.
“When I was an inspector general, I received three business days of training, and then suddenly I was an IG,” Sweazey said. “I think that’s absurd, especially when I was overseeing investigations that have real, serious ramifications and you could get dismissed from the military via the administrative process—that’s a big deal. For that, you need somebody with more than 72 hours of training, in my humble opinion.”
Sweazey noted that inspectors general are political appointees and often treated politically—Trump replaced a number of inspectors general from the previous administration during his first term in 2020, and President Barack Obama removed AmeriCorps IG Gerald Walpin in 2009. But any indicator that Trump will make good on his promise of IG independence has yet to come.
“I have guarded optimism, I guess is the best phrase, that the removal of the head of the agency is a step in that direction,” Sweazey said. “But true reform has not yet materialized.”
Don’t expect it, says Joe Spielberger at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog organization that reports on government waste, corruption, and accountability. He worries that the system, flawed as it is, could become less accountable, more politicized and beholden to the demands of senior leadership in the new administration.
“When we see these very clear and blatant moves, like with these recent firings, that really paints a picture that these decisions are being made for partisan political reasons, and not because of the need for increased accountability in the federal government,” said Spielberger, the senior policy counsel at POGO’s Effective and Accountable Government team. “It really also plays a huge role in creating that wider chilling effect.
“It can just really cause much more confusion and chaos and lack of clarity about whether these individuals in these [inspector general] offices really are serving in the best interests of the people.”
Positive Signs at VA Before Firings
Well-known veteran whistleblowers say change has been slow in coming at the Department of Veterans Affairs, an organization historically so beset by reports of whistleblower reprisal that in 2017 Congress established a separate Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection to remedy the problem. But they point to recent signs of positive change—before Trump’s firings.
Shea Wilkes, an Army veteran who played a key role in exposing the VA’s infamous waitlist scandal while working at the Shreveport, Louisiana, VA Medical Center in 2014, has testified before Congress about being placed under criminal investigation and effectively suspended from his work after blowing the whistle. Wilkes still has issues with the VA OIG—he’s bothered that it has “no bite”—no enforcement authority over the VA with its recommendations—and contends that investigations can often be a box-checking exercise.
But Wilkes said he was impressed by his interactions with Michael Missal, the VA inspector general who had led the office for eight years before being fired by Trump in January. Despite Wilkes’ reputation for calling out leaders, which has caused some to keep their distance, Missal engaged right away, he said.
“I communicated with him via email directly a few times, and he would actually respond to me,” Wilkes said, adding that he believed investigations under Missal were more aggressive and direct.
“I thought he did better, and I thought [the VA OIG investigations under Missal] would actually call out the VA,” Wilkes said.
Missal, who joined seven other fired inspectors general last month in filing a lawsuit alleging that their terminations without notice were illegal, told The War Horse that he’d taken pains to stay objective and distinct from the VA in his job. Once, he said, he turned down an invitation to join an office birthday party for the VA secretary.
“I said, ‘The last thing I want is for me to be seen celebrating the secretary’s birthday,’” Missal recalled. “It’s things like that—to me, you’re giving the appearance you’re not independent. And I never went to staff meetings of the VA; I never went to any event in which we didn’t have sort of an official role.”
While Missal acknowledges the OIG still has no enforcement authority over the VA, he said he worked to improve accountability within the office, launching a data group that would request information ranging from dialysis recipients to prosthetics purchases to improve data analytics and locate waste and malfeasance.
What Comes Next
Missal has little optimism for what will come next for IGs in the current administration, fearing that the watchdog agencies could be dismantled, or that fired inspectors general will be replaced with leaders less concerned about accountability than with pleasing the White House.
“Either way ... veterans are going to suffer, because we did so many things that helped VA improve, which benefited veterans,” he told The War Horse.
As for Bencs, she’s not giving up—she plans to submit a response to the DoD IG report with statements from witnesses she says will back her up.
Her role as a whistleblower in the catastrophic leak has been highlighted in the local media and championed by local groups like O’ahu Water Protectors.
“If I had just gone on and [said] everything was hunky dory ... I don’t think I would have learned what I learned,” she said.
Like the Walk the Talk Foundation, Bencs wants to see the IG fully removed from the purview of the Defense Department, and hopes the current upheaval will force a move in that direction.
“I think this is a good catalyst to force change with my case and with others,” she said. “It’s got to stop.”
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This War Horse story was reported by Hope Hodge Seck, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
