President Joe Biden is poised to nominate Robert Storch, who is currently inspector general for the National Security Agency, to fill the same role for the Department of Defense.
The White House publicly revealed Biden’s selection on Monday to fill the vacancy, which has not had a Senate-confirmed head for five years.
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Storch has served as the NSA inspector general since January 2017, after having first been nominated by former President Barack Obama, then renominated by former President Donald Trump. The Harvard and Columbia Law-trained Storch previously worked in the Department of Justice’s inspector general’s office and, before that, was a federal prosecutor in the Middle District of Florida.
The White House, in a readout about the selection, praised Storch for leading the NSA’s Office of the Inspector General “to enhance the impact, the independence, and the transparency of the office’s work, including the creation of its independent public website, and the now-regular public release of unclassified versions of its Semiannual Reports to Congress with a number of underlying reports and summaries.”
The DOD inspector general position has been without a Senate-confirmed chief since the end of the Obama administration.
Glenn Fine spent years as the acting inspector general, but he was demoted in April 2020 by Trump shortly after he was selected by his fellow inspectors general to investigate how COVID-19 relief funds were being spent.
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The demotion left him unable to lead the committee, and he ultimately resigned from the position in June 2020.
