Inspectors general lead independent oversight offices that seek to root out waste, fraud and abuse in — and otherwise improve the efficiency and effectiveness of — government programs. Lucy Lang, the IG for the state of New York, wants more Americans to know they exist.
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, he has fired nearly 20 of the watchdogs and installed several individuals who previously worked for his administration into the oversight positions. IGs are legally required to be appointed “without regard to political affiliation.”
Lang, who became New York’s IG in 2021 and previously served as a Manhattan prosecutor, argues that increased public awareness about the watchdogs’ work could serve as a bulwark against future attempts to weaken IGs.
In this interview with Government Executive, she discusses her office’s civic education campaign to teach students about IGs, including through a comic book that she wrote, how the state watchdog uses social media to engage more citizens and why she traces the origins of IGs to Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian military officer who, as an IG, standardized training for the Continental Army at Valley Forge.
Editor’s note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Q. What made you realize that IGs need to engage more with the public?
A.I was guest speaking at a government class at the University of Albany when I asked the seniors where they got their information about government. With one exception, 30 students said to me they got their information from independent journalists on Instagram and TikTok. They had not had personal interactions with elected or appointed officials in their lifetimes, so it made me realize two things.
One, we need to be really strategic and intentional about using platforms that reach a whole range of demographics, and our work using traditional media like op-eds and press releases was inadequate for educating the full breadth of the public who we serve. And second, my colleagues in government and I have been really deficient in our investment in civic education. So when 17 of my federal colleagues were fired the first Friday night of this administration’s current term, I felt right away that the lack of public outcry was really on us. We hadn’t fulfilled our mandate to communicate with the public about the important work that we’re doing on their behalf. That is part of what has made oversight so vulnerable in recent years.
Q. Why create a comic book specifically?
A. In addition to America 250, the offices of the New York state inspector general are celebrating our 40th year. We wanted to be thoughtful about using this opportunity both to look backward and to think prospectively. As a student of history, I have come to the view that part of our work on civic education should call on the country’s long history — dating back to the republic, right back to the revolution — of oversight.
We had already built out a very robust paid internship program for college and law students that we’ve been operating for several years. But looking at the numbers of high school students who are unable to identify the three branches of government, much less have any sense of what an inspector general is and does, I felt like we needed to start earlier than just our college and law school internship program. So we created a modular curriculum that we have been teaching around New York state over the course of this year, and we’ll continue to teach in the future.
We were doing that at the high school level, and then a friend’s kid — a middle school student— asked if he could come work for me. And I said, “I really don’t have a job for an eighth grader.” But that made me think that we should do something for even younger kids. We just launched a youth advisory council, where we have students from around New York state who applied and were accepted to our six-week program, which meets virtually for two hours a week to look at different parts of oversight. It also seeks input from students about ways in which our government is working and ways in which it might be failing them in their communities. So we see it as a real two-way street.
Then the comic book was the result of my own fifth and seventh grade kids and thinking about how to reach kids even earlier and give them something that’s really accessible and might, for the nerdiest amongst them, even make history seem exciting and engaging. Also, perhaps the comic book would help lay some groundwork for future aspirations in public service and government or at very least — should we find ourselves in a position going forward where democratic guardrails like IGs are at risk again — it’s not the first time they’ve heard of IGs when they’ve been purged, and it’s too late to do anything about it.
Q. Any noteworthy anecdotes so far of people, young people in particular, reacting to the comic book?
A. Most noteworthy anecdotes, honestly, are from older people who look at it and say, “I can’t believe that you thought of this” and how different it is from the approaches they have seen the government taking in the past. But I have heard from some of the elementary and middle school students who we pushed it out to that it’s the first time that they learned in a way that they feel prompts them to ask follow-up questions about this really niche area of U.S. history. So that’s been cool.
It’s ongoing, and we just put it out last month, and we’ve just distributed it throughout New York state’s middle schools. I’m hoping we’ll have more data, both about how many students we’re reaching and about what the potential impact is on their thinking about the government and their relationship to it.
Q. You talked about getting young people interested in public service and oversight work. What do you think government leaders could do to help connect young people who might be interested in this field to opportunities?
A. One major initiative that we undertook — and this is perhaps obvious — is that we changed what had been, prior to my arrival five years ago, a fairly ad hoc and an unpaid internship program into a paid internship. We were really only attracting young people who were in a position to live at home and pay for their summer opportunities, as compared to the interns we want who would ideally reflect the public who we serve. That’s helped us really diversify our internship program.
The other piece is trying to, as they say, meet people where they are. We have found that our use of social media has significantly increased the amount of interest in our programming. Frankly, we take advantage of our interns’ ideas in doing that too. We had an intern this summer who was working as an auditor, but happened to have a really uncanny knack for social media. So she came to us with a bunch of ideas, which we took and found that we were able to reach a whole new kind of sector of the public because of her ideas.
Oversight is the name of the game, and OIG knows how to play it. We published our 2025 Annual Report on Gaming Commission Oversight, detailing our work to strengthen integrity in the gaming sector. Read the full report at https://t.co/A18E0DrgaH https://t.co/LbfNCh0Bmi
— NYS Inspector General (@NewYorkStateIG) August 21, 2026
I think that what my colleagues in government and I can do most to reach a wider swath of folks is to really listen to and take to heart feedback from young people who are so often kind of shut out of conversations. Especially for elected officials, there is an easy default to “Okay young people don’t vote” or “I’m thinking on a two- or four-year election cycle, so it’s not a wise use of my time and resources,” but that’s so short-sighted. What we’re really trying to do — all of us one hopes, and this is not unique to either party — should be educating a committed body politic who want involvement, engagement and who are equipped to participate in government in whatever way, regardless of whether it manifests itself in a vote in two weeks or not.
Q. Given your work and interests as an IG, could you give three suggestions to federal IGs on how they can make the public more aware of the work they’re doing?
A. I’ve been in conversation with some of my federal colleagues about just this, and I think it is going to require — as it did in my office, and it’s a continuing area of work — an internal culture shift. I saw this when I was a prosecutor as well, it was true for a long time among prosecuting and law enforcement agencies, but there’s a sense of “We can’t talk about things because of due process concerns and other constitutional protections” and, as a result, we’ll just clam up on everything.
In comparison, we can engage but just be mindful of what the legal restrictions are. It’s okay to say, “I can’t talk about that, but here’s what I do want to tell you about that we’re doing.” Something that I know federal inspectors general do think about is there are times where we may audit or review a program or commence an investigation and there’s not a criminal outcome or even a disciplinary outcome. But we still want to tell the public: “We looked at this program, and it’s actually working well the way it’s supposed to.” We owe it to the public to say that too and not just the conclusions that are traditionally aligned with what law enforcement does.
Q. Is there anything you’ve done in your office with public engagement that you think would be easily replicable by a federal agency IG?
A. The social media piece is low-hanging fruit. That said, I don’t know that we have enough data to say definitively that it is having a transformative effect on public opinion. But I think that over time, at scale, as more government offices and not just IGs lean in to making government accessible through social media platforms, that it will have a transformative effect.
It’s not just putting out the press releases when there are conclusive findings. It is also sometimes the human interest stuff about staff. Sometimes it’s the more soft public service type things that we might do, like partnering with an agency to plant trees in celebration of the parks department’s anniversary. That kind of soft stuff makes clear we’re out there and we’re doing the work.
We’re in the moo-d to reminisce about The Great @NYSFair! Especially our run-in with the @newyorklottery Wow Cow! Suspect fraud or corruption in New York’s gaming industry? Report it to 1-800-DO-RIGHT. https://t.co/00RZ31fhpL
— NYS Inspector General (@NewYorkStateIG) October 19, 2026
Also, I think making staff available to speak to groups who are interested is huge. I think it is not common amongst my IG colleagues, but I hope it will become increasingly more so. Meeting with community groups, going into schools, talking to community boards, these are not functions that IGs have traditionally undertaken because I think we have thought of ourselves as investigative.
But if we think of ourselves as public servants whose core job is improving the public’s trust of government, then we see that there are two streams in which to do that. One is conducting investigations to make sure that public programs do operate with integrity, and the other is telling the public that we’re here and doing that work so that they can see that the government is structured in a way that is designed to operate with integrity.
Q. Is there a question I didn’t ask that you wished I had?
A. It is really both interesting and inspiring to bear in mind that inspectors general, who many folks think date back to post-Watergate [and the Inspector General Act of 1978], actually go back to the revolutions. I would point Americans to Baron von Steuben — whose statue stands outside the White House — who was George Washington’s inspector general who really helped turn the tide of the Revolutionary War at and after Valley Forge, and through to the Civil War when inspectors were on the battlefields counting munitions and helping ensure the integrity of the Union Army.
Then, of course, the shift to the civilian side after Watergate, and then the buildup of state and local IGs, all of this is a throughline to me of how, when democracy is tested, we have built oversight institutions, and by and large, it has worked. I hope more Americans pay attention to IGs, become IGs and that IGs persist 250 years and beyond in being a core part of the guardrails that maintain precious democracy.
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