The following editorial appeared Tuesday in the Dallas Morning News.

Stuart Bowen is a Republican government official who has served his country well in difficult times. The White House legal staffer and former Texas assistant attorney general became the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction when Congress created the position in 2004.

His mission: to root out waste, fraud and abuse of the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars pouring into Iraq.

He has performed splendidly, though his regular reports detailing massive corruption, incompetence and even alleged criminality in the Iraq rebuilding program have made for infuriating reading. Only last week Bowen told Congress that the U.S. military can’t account for a vast arsenal of weapons it was supposed to provide to Iraqi security forces – but which now could be used to kill and maim American soldiers.

Bowen has taken his job seriously – so seriously, in fact, that the White House attempted to cripple his office earlier this year by shifting some oversight responsibility to the State Department.

And now, Bowen has gotten his due. House Republican staffers quietly slipped a provision into a vast military appropriations bill, recently signed into law by the president, killing the funding for Bowen’s office.

Bipartisan outrage is building among members of Congress who claim to have had no idea about the last-minute legislative shenanigans.

Irate GOP Sens. John Warner of Virginia and Susan Collins of Maine told the New York Times they’re now trying to reverse the law because, in Warner’s words, “His office has performed important work, (and) much remains to be done.”

That’s putting it mildly. Without Bowen and his team, unspeakable sums of money and material could go down the rat hole with the public remaining ignorant.

If Congress has any sense of duty, to say nothing of institutional self-respect, it will restore Bowen.

He was doing a critically important job and apparently doing it quite well.

Recent findings of the inspector:

1. As we near the end of the year in which Iraq reconstruction projects were supposed to have been handed off to Iraqis, the Baghdad government is spending little of the $6 billion in U.S. funds it has been given on actual work.

2. The U.S. military cannot fully account for 278,000 weapons it purchased for Iraqi security forces – weapons that inspectors say could be in the hands of insurgents.

3. Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Houston-based Halliburton, has been exploiting federal privacy regulations to keep details of its performance on Iraq contracts hidden from government oversight.

4. The $75 million new police facility, “the most essential security project in the country,” will have to be demolished because of construction so shoddy sewer pipes were leaking urine and feces onto recruits.