The End of the Ombudsman

In 1990, the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) urged “the President and Congress to support federal agency initiatives to create and fund an effective ombudsman in those agencies with significant interaction with the public.” The ACUS, for those like me who hadn’t thought about/known of the entity until this moment, is “an independent federal agency within the executive branch whose statutory mission is to identify ways to improve the procedures by which federal agencies protect the public interest and determine the rights, privileges, and obligations of private persons.”

Ombudsman, the ACUS report notes, is a Swedish word for “agent” or “representative.” The purpose of an ombudsman in US agencies, according to the ACUS, is provide:

… a means of inquiring into citizen grievances about administrative acts or failures to act and, in suitable cases, to criticize or to make recommendations concerning future official conduct. Typically, an ombudsman investigates selected complaints and issues nonbinding reports, with recommendations addressing problems or future improvements deemed to be desirable. In cases involving the agencies of the government, an ombudsman may deal with complaints arising from maladministration, abusive or indifferent treatment, tardiness, unresponsiveness, and the like. To succeed, an ombudsman must have influence with, and the confidence of, top levels of an agency, be independent, and be able to conduct meaningful investigations into a complaint without being thwarted by the agency staff whose work is being examined. The most successful occupants of that office have generally been persons of high rank and status with direct access to the highest level of authority.

AILA reports that yesterday the Trump administration closed the USCS Ombudsman, DHS Civil Right and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO) offices.

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin justified closing these offices in this way:

“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining [the department’s] mission… Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”

-KitJ