'Watchdogs': Holding the government accountable

Glenn A. Fine is a nonresident fellow in the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School. Fine served as the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Justice from 2000 to 2011 during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. He also served as the acting inspector general of the U.S. Department of Defense from 2016 to 2020. He has testified more than 50 times before Congressional committees and has written extensively on the role of inspectors general, federal investigations, and management in government agencies. He majored in economics at Harvard University and earned a JD from Harvard Law School.

Craig Whitlock is a Washington Post investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief, and reported from more than 60 countries. His books include The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, which debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy. He joined the Washington Post in 1998 and holds an AB in history from Duke University.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, is director of the Katzmann Initiative and visiting fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. She is also an advisory board member for the White House Transition Project, a fellow with the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service, and was secretary of the Governance Institute. Tenpas is a scholar of the American presidency focused on White House staffing, presidential transitions, and the intersection of politics and policy within the presidency (e.g., presidential reelection campaigns, trends in presidential travel, and polling).

Guian McKee is a professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center. He received a PhD in American history at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2002, and is the author of Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) and The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (University of Chicago Press, 2008). At the Miller Center, McKee co-directs the Health Care Policy Project and serves as co-chair of the Presidential Recordings Program. His research focuses on how federal policy, especially in the executive branch, plays out at the local level in American communities.