Nearly a week after whistleblowers revealed what federal investigators called “gross mismanagement” in the handling of the remains of United States soldiers at Dover Air Force Base mortuary, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., has called for an immediate investigation of the Air Force Inspector General.

“I call on you to act immediately to ensure that there is full and decisive accountability for those responsible for the failings at Dover,” McCaskill said in a letter to Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz. “The Air Force cannot address major failings in leadership and management with half-hearted corrective action and the assignment of limited individual responsibility. Accountability must be swift and decisive,” she said in the letter.

McCaskill, who has long supported protection of whistleblowers involved in federal investigations, also demanded protection for the people that unearthed the Dover Air Force Base allegations.

“Whistleblowers are often the eyes and ears that help ensure accountability within the federal government,” she wrote. “Any reprisal against a federal whistleblower is unacceptable.”

This call to action comes in the wake of the revelation that the Dover mortuary, the base that handles the remains of the U.S.’ fallen soldiers, had been practicing careless management in the care of soldiers’ remains.

The Air Force admitted that employees of the mortuary misplaced body parts and in one extreme case sawed off the arm bone of a Marine in order to fit the body into the coffin, without informing the dead marine’s family, The Washington Post reported.

“Recent reports of gross mismanagement and mishandling of remains at the Dover Air Force Base were appalling and have undermined the confidence that the American public has in the military’s performance of its sanctified mission at Dover,” McCaskill wrote in the letter.

McCaskill also led the Senate’s effort last year to overhaul management of Arlington National Cemetery, after unmarked and mismarked graves of veterans were discovered.