A Zealous Watchman to Follow the Money

[elleng]

'There is an alligator head in Earl E. Devaney’s office, with a tiny camera concealed inside. The covert pictures it snapped in a Louisiana bayou caught an Interior Department official on a fishing trip he had accepted as a bribe, but today the stuffed gator lives on as a toothy deterrent to corruption.

“When an assistant secretary comes in and asks about it, I tell that story and they get a little unnerved,” said Mr. Devaney, the inspector general for the Interior Department and the man President Obama has chosen to police the spending of the $787 billion stimulus package.

In 38 years of government service, Mr. Devaney, a hulking former college football lineman and Secret Service man, has been unnerving would-be miscreants. But now the Big Man, as Mr. Devaney’s colleagues call him, is taking on an incomparably bigger job, tracking a sum 50 times the agency’s annual budget as chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board — or as the irresistible acronym has it, RAT Board.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/us/politics/10devaney.html?th&emc=th