Isabella Gallo
April 16, 2026
Not many people know about the 40-year-old office of the New York inspector general and the its role as a governmental watchdog.
Changing that, says current Inspector General Lucy Lang, is critical to the office’s mission of ensuring government integrity, particularly during a time when President Donald Trump has eroded public trust by firing over a dozen of her counterparts in the federal government.
“At a time when public trust in government is at historic lows and the foundation of our democracy is under attack, I see the 250th anniversary of our [country] as a call to action to bring the public into public integrity,” Lang said to a crowd of about 50 people on Tuesday at an on-stage interview at New York Law School. “A government that operates with integrity must communicate about its work to the public so the government can earn people’s trust.”
To Lang, that meant the work of her office had to extend beyond undertaking investigations and developing standards to prevent fraud. So, she applied a lesson she learned while serving as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
“I long believed that prosecutions are a tool of district attorneys, not the goal. Safe and thriving communities are the goal,” Lang said. “Similarly, as I undertook the role of IG, I realized that investigations are not the goal, but are a tool of a watchdog. The goal is a government that operates with integrity.”
Lang has been in her post since 2021, when Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed her to head the state’s investigations into government misconduct in the wake of ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation.
Since then, she’s carried out a slew of investigations during her time in office, cracking down on abuses in the state’s worker compensation program, gaming industry, welfare programs and prison system. But, she’s placed equal weight on reshaping how her office relates to the rest of state government and conducting public outreach to inform New Yorkers about what she can do for them.
Breaking from past practice, Lang doesn’t sit as a member of the governor’s cabinet because, in her opinion, that would place her too close to the commissioners of state agencies she’s tasked with investigating. She also separated her office’s operations from those of other state agencies, ended the practice of seeking the governor’s approval prior to issuing public reports and implemented major transparency measures, including publishing decades worth of previously unpublished materials.
Lang has also developed a social media presence across all platforms — which are reaching enough people that she now receives complaints of misconduct through them — works with the Office of the Aging to reach older adults who may be more vulnerable to scams and regularly speaks at schools and other public events to ensure people know they can raise issues they’ve experienced while working in state government or misconduct they believe is taking place.
“It is vital to bring the public into public integrity,” Lang said. “That public must include vulnerable members of our communities [and] focusing resources on programs designed to support the most vulnerable New Yorkers.”
Another avenue Lang’s using to increase public trust in government is exposing — and closing— the gap between a government agency’s stated values and actual behavior, or, as she said the institutional failure of the difference between policy and practice.
One investigation into that gap took place a few years ago, Lang said, after the state failed to comply with its own domestic violence workplace policies when a woman working for a state agency told senior officials that she was a victim of domestic violence.
That woman had been using her state-issued phone to document the abuse, as her husband monitored her personal phone, Lang said. When she told senior officials in her agency about what was going on, she was met with disciplinary action for misuse of her state-issued device. About a year later, her husband killed her and himself.
“I will not tell you that a different response from her agency would have saved her life,” Lang said. “What we can know is that the system failed to respond the way it was supposed to, and the results were catastrophic.”
“That gap is what oversight exists to find,” she continued. “The gap between what an organization says that it stands for and what it does, even when doing the right thing may require departure from a routine or decision between multiple conflicting protocols.”
