Trump bailout watchdog draws praise over independence

Bloomberg

The White House lawyer tapped to oversee disbursements from a massive US pandemic relief fund is a former seminarian with decades of oversight experience yet still faces questions over whether he’ll do President Donald Trump’s bidding instead of protecting taxpayers.
Brian Miller will be the main watchdog over $500 billion directed to big business by Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s Treasury Department. The spending is part of a more than $2 trillion rescue package passed by Congress to salve an economy suffering under a virus-induced, stay-at-home coma.
Miller, 64, was born in
New York City and is a 1977 graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia. He studied at Westminster Theological Seminary, and earned his law degree from the University of Texas School of Law in 1983.
Since then he’s probed health care fraud for the Justice
Department and monitored spending at the General Services Administration.
Trump named Miller to become Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery — a post the president already has sought to bridle by limiting its communications with Congress. That same evening, the president fired the US intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who brought a whistle-blower’s complaint to Congress that led to the president’s impeachment in the House.
The moves fed foreboding that Trump may resist adhering to the maze of rules and
restrictions surrounding federal spending as months of frenzied check-writing commence.
“The inspector general providing oversight of the federal response of this historic relief package for workers and families must be independent from politics,” House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.
After law school, Miller spent time in private practice and then with the US Commission on Civil Rights. He was with the Justice Department from 1990 until 2005, including time as special counsel on healthcare fraud.
In 2005, President George W Bush tapped him to be inspector general at the General Services Administration. While in that post he was publicly critical
of the agency’s administrator,
Lurita Doan.
In testimony to Congress in 2007, Miller told lawmakers “the record does not support Administrator Doan’s assertion that she did everything she could to clean up the situation.”
Doan told lawmakers the inspector general’s tactics were “excessive and intrusive” and that he was resisting oversight of spending by his office.
The next year, she resigned after a House committee investigated whether she had used her office to support Republican candidates.
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight that investigates corruption, said Miller was “very good during the Bush administration” at the GSA. Yet she still expressed apprehension.
“I don’t care how heroic Brian or any inspector general is, I do not see how they can feel confident doing their best work knowing they can be fired by the president for political reasons,” she said in an interview.