(Sarah L. Voisin/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, is retiring. He oversaw tracking of economic stimulus waste, fraud and abuse. He is pictured in the Recovery Operations Center.
Ask stimulus watchdog Earl Devaney about the economic program and he’ll tell you that federal agencies are distributing about $840 billion in a transparent, relatively fraud-free way. Ask him about much-
debated questions — whether the program spurred job creation, saved the economy or faced political pressure from the Obama administration — and he shifts in his seat.
Politics, Devaney said, was never part of his job description.
Since 2009, he’s served as the head of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which Congress set up to deal with the logistics of the stimulus. Devaney and his team of 50 auditors and investigators track the funds, keeping watch for waste or fraud.
“There was very little, if any, politics involved in all of this,” Devaney said in a recent interview.
And now, he said, he’s done. On Dec. 1 he announced that he will retire at the end of the month, after 41 years of federal service.
Devaney did concede that the Energy Department’s decision to give hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus grants to the now-bankrupt solar energy company Solyndra appears to have been mishandled.
“Maybe the Department of Energy was engaged in business that they didn’t really have that great an expertise in,” he said.
Whatever the issues there — or not — Devaney said, his office wouldn’t have picked up on the circumstances, because “we didn’t have anything to do with who got the [stimulus] money. We had everything to do with showing it to you and trying to prevent it from being stolen and wasted.”
In that, he said, the office succeeded.
“I think this money was so transparent that guys that really commit big frauds and try to steal big money just stayed with the old tried-and-true fraud and waste like Medicare fraud and didn’t come near this money,” he said.
Despite early concerns with the reliability of data compiled by the board and the speed with which it was published, transparency experts generally agree that Devaney’s efforts broke new ground on how the public reviews federal spending information.
Working in four agencies over four decades, Devaney honed a reputation as a nonpartisan fixer. The announcement of his retirement even prompted a rare bit of agreement between the White House and congressional Republicans.
In a statement, Vice President Biden said Devaney kept watch of the stimulus program “with an unprecedented level of transparency.”
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) agreed. “Supporters of accountable government will miss the energy, tenacity and innovation” Devaney brought to the job, Issa said.
In early 2009, after almost a decade as the Interior Department’s inspector general, Devaney was invited to a meeting with Biden to discuss the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board job.
Devaney had already promised his wife, Judy, that he would soon retire.
“I practiced all weekend saying no” to Biden, Devaney recalled. “Something like ‘I’m really honored’ or ‘Let me give you some names you could consider instead of me.’ ”
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