PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S purge of me and my 17 fellow inspectors-general (IGs) raises questions that reach far beyond the work we did. These include constitutional questions that, depending on how they are answered, could fundamentally change how the federal government is perceived and operates.
IGs are the watchdogs of the federal government, providing fair, objective and independent oversight inside federal agencies. When I served as the inspector-general for the Department of the Interior and chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), I viewed us as taxpayers’ representatives inside those agencies.
The way the mass firing of the 18 IGs on January 24th was carried out should sound alarms. More important, it could represent an existential threat to objective, open oversight of America’s government.
For starters, the terse termination email did not meet the statutory requirements for removing an IG. In 2022 Congress passed a mandate that requires a president to give at least 30 days’ notice, and substantive and case-specific reasons, when firing an IG. The White House did neither; the removals were effective immediately and the only reason given was “changing priorities”. This decidedly non-specific justification risks politicising the IGs and undermining the most important factor in their effectiveness: independence.
Congress adopted the notice provision so it could conduct its constitutional responsibility to oversee the executive branch. One would imagine that Congress would want to defend its prerogatives, but its response to the firings has been tepid—including from some members hitherto supportive of IGs. Senator Lindsey Graham dismissed the affair with a verbal eye-roll, saying the removals broke the law, but only “technically”.
IGs were designed to be insulated from the policy priorities of any one administration. For nearly half a century, oversight by these watchdogs has rested on a neutral, objective assessment of federal programmes and operations. Under the Inspector General Act, IGs are prohibited from being involved in things like formulating policy or implementing programmes. This is meant to ensure their priorities do not conflict when they assess the efficiency of any policy or programme.
With its IGs, America has created a valuable and unique system of accountability. It is not perfect, but in my experience IGs have constantly sought ways to make their work more effective.
For me personally, getting fired was devastating. I had dedicated my entire career to serving taxpayers. I saw myself, my fellow IGs and our teams as cape-wearing superheroes, sworn to cut waste, combat fraud and end abuse of taxpayer dollars.
And we built a remarkable track record. In the 2023 fiscal year alone, the work of the IGs resulted in potential savings of $93bn for federal programmes, according to a CIGIE report to the president and Congress. That was around $6.6m for every member of the IGs’ combined staff of 14,000—or, put another way, more than $25,000 per employee per working day. That same year, investigations by IGs—which make up around half of their work, the rest being audits and evaluations—led to 4,691 indictments and “criminal informations” (charges without a grand jury), 4,318 successful prosecutions and several thousand more successful civil and personnel actions.
There is no shortage of evidence from the trenches, too, to support the claim that we were the good guys. The health and human-services IG uncovered appalling conditions for thousands of elderly Americans in nursing homes and helped protect many more from similar abuses. The transportation IG played an important role in investigating criminal conduct in connection with the crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, and in auditing regulatory oversight and aircraft-certification processes in their aftermath. Our colleague for housing went after a number of public-housing landlords who were sexual predators. My own office launched inspections to cut waste, fraud and abuse in Native American schools. The list goes on.
In short, we were doing the sort of work that the new Department of Government Efficiency, overseen by Elon Musk, might be expected to applaud. We are natural allies. Much of the IGs’ focus is on increasing efficiency, and they know where the proverbial bodies are buried inside federal agencies. So I had high hopes for synergy with DOGE during the transition. But that clearly didn’t happen.
Being summarily fired in a two-sentence email was a gut-punch. But it is two bigger things that keep me up at night. The first is the fear that, having weakened the IGs, the White House will try to keep them in that state. Although I have confidence in the staff who remain in place, it might become hard to make tough calls without strong leaders in those IG positions. Will the acting IGs feel able to speak truth to power? Or will the abrupt firing of their predecessors create a chilling effect?
The second concern is longer-term. If Mr Trump replaces the fired IGs with lackeys—beholden to a political party or instructed to support an administration’s policies, rather than to uncover the truth—it is likely to trigger a vicious cycle in which each incoming president reflexively fires the IGs from the previous administration. That would change the very nature of the IGs’ role—no longer an oasis of nonpartisanship, it would become a bastion of political hackery.
If IGs are considered part of a presidential administration or political camp, their credibility will be shot. Their findings and recommendations will inevitably be dismissed as political documents, written to support one or other party’s policy agenda, or to undermine its opponents.
Some of the issues raised by the firings, including the failure to honour the 30-day notice requirement, will be resolved in the courts. The stakes are high. If the president prevails, it will mark a sea change in how the federal government works for the foreseeable future. And if, as looks all too possible, he chooses to replace the IGs with stooges loyal only to him, it could mark the end of fair, independent oversight from within.■
Mark Greenblatt was inspector-general of the United States Department of the Interior from 2019 to 2025 and chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency from 2023 to 2024.