His daughter Nancy Fitzgerald-Greene confirmed his death.
A government whistleblower who preferred to be labeled a truth-teller, Fitzgerald testified more than 50 times on Capitol Hill about fraud, pork and cost overruns. His blunt and often public assessments, delivered in an Alabamian drawl, led him to be treated as an outcast inside the Pentagon for many years.
In the 1980s, Verne Orr, secretary of the Air Force, called him “the most hated person in the Air Force.”
But he remained undeterred. He plowed through internal documents to bare boondoggles like Boeing’s vastly overcharging the Pentagon for its work on cruise missiles, and the Air Force’s paying $916.55 each for plastic caps for stool legs that had really cost 34 cents.
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In 1987, Fitzgerald brought some of the Air Force’s overpriced spare parts onto “Late Night with David Letterman."
In a tribute delivered on the Senate floor on Feb. 6, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Fitzgerald’s analyses had informed his ability to maintain oversight of the Pentagon budget since the 1980s.
“Ernie’s fiscal forensics uncovered mountains of mismatched receipts and invoice gaps that left taxpayers footing the tab for rampant waste and unchecked spending sprees,” Grassley said.
“Ernie,” he added, “was a sleuth for the truth.”
That reputation was secured on Nov. 13, 1968, when Fitzgerald, a civilian deputy for management systems for the Air Force, testified to the Senate Subcommittee on Economy in Government about the ballooning costs of Lockheed’s 120 C-5A Galaxy transport planes. Before he left home for the hearing, his wife, Nell (Burroughs) Fitzgerald, warned him that he had to tell the truth, even if his superiors did not want him to.
“I told him that I didn’t really think I could live with a man I didn’t respect,” she recalled in an article about him in People magazine in 1985.
And when Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., chairman of the subcommittee, asked him about the C-5A overruns, Fitzgerald volunteered, “Your figure could be approximately right,” and outlined the program’s cost control and administrative failures.
“Cost control is essentially an antisocial activity,” he told the subcommittee. “Nobody likes an efficiency expert.”
Retaliation was swift. Soon after testifying, Fitzgerald lost his Civil Service tenure. He was removed from examining the costs of major weapons systems and shifted to audit Air Force mess halls and bowling alleys in Thailand. Then, a year after testifying, he was told his job was being eliminated. By early 1970, he was out of his Air Force job.
“We profess to revere truth in the government,” Fitzgerald said in an interview with The New York Times in 1983, “yet, when someone commits truth, they are in a heap of trouble.”
The White House had apparently been watching the Fitzgerald drama. Alexander Butterfield, an aide to President Richard M. Nixon, wrote in a memorandum on Jan. 20, 1970, that Fitzgerald had been disloyal. His recommendation: “We let him bleed, for a while at least.”
A White House tape later showed that Nixon had approved of Fitzgerald’s dismissal.
Believing himself blackballed in his attempts to find a job in the private sector, where he had worked for 14 years after graduating from college, Fitzgerald battled to return to the Air Force. In 1973, the Civil Service Commission ordered his reinstatement. In the ruling, the chief appeals examiner said Fitzgerald’s firing had been falsely disguised as an economy move when it had actually been “purely personal.”
Upon returning to the Air Force, Fitzgerald continued to be excluded from examining the projects of contractors like Lockheed and Boeing. But he learned of financial abuses through others at the Pentagon and often worked with the staffs of Grassley and Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. (who died Feb. 7), to set up oversight hearings.
Fitzgerald also sued Nixon and other White House aides in 1978 for $3.5 million in damages. Court documents — in a separate case on presidential immunity filed by Morton Halperin, a former national security aide — revealed that Nixon had quietly paid Fitzgerald $144,000 to drop damage claims against him if the Supreme Court ruled that the former president was financially liable for actions he had taken while in office.
But in a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled in 1982 that presidents were entitled to “absolute immunity” from civil damages.
Arthur Ernest Fitzgerald was born July 31, 1926, in Birmingham, Alabama, where his father, Arthur, was a metal and wool patternmaker and his mother, Grace (Montgomery) Fitzgerald, was a farmer and homemaker. After serving in the Navy, he attended the University of Alabama and graduated with a bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering.
He took a job with the Air Force in 1965.
“He had a friend who had started working for the Air Force while JFK was in office,” Fitzgerald-Greene said in a telephone interview, “and he alerted my father to the things they could do to save money in the military.”
Fitzgerald’s early work at the service earned him its nomination for the Department of Defense’s Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 1967. He received many other honors, including the Paul Douglas Award for Ethics in Government in 1986 from the University of Illinois. He retired in 2006.
Knowing that his relentlessness and public candor had hurt him within the Pentagon, Fitzgerald helped create a safe place for other whistleblowers — he called them his “closet patriots” — to leak unclassified documents without their identities being made public. In 1981, he, Dina Rasor and Anne Zill started the Project on Military Procurement, which in 1990 was renamed the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO.
“He was officially marginalized in the Air Force, but he was still effective because people gave him information — he called it a Pentagon underground,” Danielle Brian, the executive director of POGO, said by telephone.
Fitzgerald continued to advise the oversight group until two years ago.
Fitzgerald wrote two books, “The High Priests of Waste” (1972) and “The Pentagonists: An Insider’s View of Waste, Mismanagement and Fraud in Defense Spending” (1989.)
In addition to Fitzgerald-Greene, his survivors include another daughter, Susan Fitzgerald; a son, John, and four grandchildren.
Chuck Spinney, a critic of overpriced weapons systems who became friendly with Fitzgerald in the late 1970s, wrote on his blog that Fitzgerald had once told him how best to simplify the complexities of Pentagon spending.
First it was necessary to point out to the average person how overpricing works with familiar objects, like toilet seats, hammers and ashtrays, he said.
“Then,” he added, “Step 2 is simply to explain how an F-15 or B-1 bomber or M-1 is simply a bundle of overpriced spare parts flying in close formation.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.