Inspectors General in Trump 2.0
How Congress is facilitating their demise
Please click here to opt in to receive via email our Roundup—brief daily summaries of news developments and commentary related to executive power.
Yesterday’s election of Trump-appointed Veterans Affairs Inspector General (IG) Cheryl Mason to lead the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency is a good opportunity to reflect on how President Donald Trump has reorganized the IG corps.
The conventional wisdom that Trump has brought IGs under his thumb is largely, but not entirely, correct. And to the extent it is correct, Congress bears much of the responsibility.
***
Inspectors general are executive branch watchdogs charged with conducting audits and investigating fraud and abuse. They have been important points of executive branch accountability in recent decades.
Think of the IG reports on National Security Letters, CIA detention and interrogation, the FBI’s performance concerning Robert Hanssen’s espionage, the Bush-era “President’s Surveillance Program,” the Internal Revenue Service’s use of politically targeted criteria, maladministration in the Veterans Administration, the Fast and Furious operation, and the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
IGs are not without flaws. But they have been vital in collecting facts and making recommendations with respect to important executive branch mistakes or abuses.
The three dozen or so most important IGs must receive Senate confirmation. These IGs can initiate certain audits and investigations without agency head approval, and have reporting duties to Congress. They have super-thin removal protections that have provided no protection in practice. Yet IGs have developed a kind of cultural independence within each agency beyond what the law specifies. This independence has often been “enforced” by Congress, which in the past has tended to protect IG authority.
***
President Trump in his second term has sought to diminish IG independence and power like no prior president.
He has fired or removed around 20 IGs, including at least one firing that appeared to be retaliation for actions the administration disliked. He subsequently nominated and secured confirmation of eight IGs—in Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, the Intelligence Community, the CIA, Labor, and the Small Business Administration. These IGs are on the whole unusually political in the sense of having close ties to the president or agency heads, of serving the administration’s aims, and of rejecting the usual attitude of political detachment toward the relevant agency.
In addition to the chilling effect that comes from the firings, the administration has sought to hollow out IG offices. It has done so by restricting new hires throughout the ranks of IG offices, by limiting funding to these offices, and by using the threat of further such action to gain leverage over or deter the offices. These latter strategies mirror broader Trump 2.0 efforts to incapacitate disfavored executive branch functions.
These actions have significantly diminished the IG corps. It is way behind on its meat-and-potatoes work, as the Washington Post recently reported. The Post added that career IG officials “are fearful of more cuts if the administration is dissatisfied with their work or doesn’t perceive them as sufficiently loyal.”
IGs in Trump 2.0 have also been less aggressive in scrutinizing decisions atop agencies or departments. A probable example is the recent decision by the Department of Justice IG’s Office not to pursue an investigation of allegedly politicized FBI firings, partly due to “limited resources.” (The office is currently run by a career deputy, William M. Blier, but also in the office as “senior advisor” is the Trump nominee to be the DOJ IG, Don R. Berthiaume, who was previously the acting IG.)
And as the New York Times reported, the recently confirmed DOD IG, Platte B. Moring III, froze a staff proposal “to evaluate military targeting in the Trump administration’s strikes on boats suspected of smuggling cocaine” because he wanted “to consult department leadership” before proceeding and because he worried the review “could become highly political.”
These decisions are out of character for “independent” IGs and are evidence, along with other indications, that the Trump 2.0 crackdown is working.
***
But there are counterpoints.
Consider DHS IG Joseph Cuffari, a Trump 1.0 appointee confirmed in 2019. In 2024, his IG peers recommended that President Biden consider removing him for an array of abuses and misconduct. Yet despite the Trump connection and the rocky history, Cuffari has aggressively examined malfeasance atop DHS in Trump 2.0.
Cuffari had since at least February been investigating former DHS secretary Kristi Noem’s controversial $220 million deportation ad campaign. In a letter dated March 2, he told Congress that Noem and her team had “systematically obstructed” his office’s work, and included a response from the DHS general counsel urging the IG not to communicate with Congress on the matter.
The ad investigation and the obstruction were apparently connected. Both matters caused a firestorm on both sides of the political aisle in Noem’s last testimony before she was fired in connection with the ad campaign. Perhaps the explanation for IG effectiveness here was that it was in line with White House aims in wanting Noem out.
A bigger puzzle is the Labor Department IG, Anthony D’Esposito, the ethics-challenged former Republican congressman who was confirmed last December. He has aggressively investigated alleged bad acts by Trump’s Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, including travel fraud, an inappropriate relationship, drinking on the job, and improper grant-steering.
The ongoing investigations have resulted in the resignations of Chavez-DeRemer’s chief of staff and his deputy, as well as her alleged paramour. And Chavez-DeRemer’s husband has been barred from the Labor Department for alleged sexual misconduct investigated by the IG. It is unclear, given everything else we know, why the White House would permit D’Esposito to go after the Labor Secretary who is seemingly still in Trump’s favor.
And then there is the Signalgate report by acting DOD IG Steven Stebbins, a career official who served in that role before Moring was confirmed. The report was very critical of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. I was surprised that Hegseth, who months before the final report pledged to overhaul the “weaponized” IG process, allowed the investigation to proceed to completion. Why not sideline Stebbins or shut him down?
There are probably two reasons. First, Signalgate was a huge embarrassment that was hard to defend. Second, Stebbins acted pursuant to a clear bipartisan request from the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee. An IG, including an acting one, is especially empowered when Congress backs it with bipartisan support.
The contrast with Stebbins’ confirmed successor, Moring, is telling. One would normally assume that a Senate-confirmed IG would have greater strength and independence in reviewing senior executive branch actions. But Moring had previously worked as a political appointee in Trump 1.0, was acceptable to the IG-skeptic Hegseth, was confirmed “en bloc” by a pliant Senate, and does not appear to be under any bipartisan congressional pressure to review the boat strike matter.
Congress is vital to the effectiveness of IGs—both in whom the Senate confirms and in whether key leaders press for an investigation.
***
Which brings me to Congress’s 2022 IG reform. This law—one of the very few statutory presidential power reforms to occur in the Biden era—sought to correct several presidential IG abuses. The one relevant for present purposes is the president firing an IG and then installing a loyalist, as Trump did a few times in his first term.
The law specifies that a defined “first assistant” to the IG will fill the vacant IG office unless the president directs any “officer or employee” of any IG office, at the GS-15 level or higher, who was in office for more than 90 days before the vacancy (or who is already an IG), to perform in an acting capacity.
That is a mouthful. But the bottom line, as Bob and I explained in 2022, is that this law “mak[es] it very hard for the president to replace the fired IG with an ally.” Congress further required that if the president opts to install an acting in lieu of the first assistant, he must notify Congress with “detailed and case-specific reasons.”
The vacancies aspect of the law has, to an underappreciated degree, worked. The second Trump administration has put in place eight confirmed IGs. But most Senate-confirmed IG positions are vacant. That means that these offices are run by acting officials as defined by the 2022 law or by career officials performing IG duties.
The president has tried to game the law. But for the most part, and to a remarkable degree, the administration appears to be complying, at least nominally, with both the substance of the law and the notification requirement. As best I can tell, every time the president has selected an acting IG in lieu of the first assistant, he has done so using the narrowed criteria of the 2022 law and has written to Congress explaining the action. (For examples see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
To be sure, the letters contain unitary executive rhetoric and claim that the president is communicating out of comity, not legal compulsion. The president says that the letters “should not be interpreted as a concession that the Congress can limit my power to remove any officer.” But the reality is that the administration is conforming its behavior to the law’s requirements. The result is that most IG offices around the government today are not being run by Trump cronies.
The 2022 law put up a hurdle on one avenue to presidential domination of IGs. After the 2022 reform, a president who wants to put in place a loyalist or non-independent IG must in most cases get that person through the Senate confirmation process. The assumption was that the 2022 law would check presidential opportunism on vacancies and that the Senate would stand by as a check in the confirmation process to protect IGs.
But here the Senate has fallen flat. It has confirmed eight Trump-nominated IGs, most of whom have Trump administration ties and do not seem committed to the independence of the IG office.
In these respects, the Senate has acquiesced and indeed supported Trump’s takeover of IG offices. Even traditional IG champion Sen. Chuck Grassley has shown relatively little life in actually protecting IGs, especially compared to his past practices. All this despite the manifest malfeasance that pervades the executive branch. The IG story is part of a larger tale of Congress giving up its prerogatives and supporting Trump’s unitary executive despite its abuses.
***
Civil society watchdogs have complained about how many IG offices Trump has left without Senate-confirmed leadership.
But on balance, it seems to me better for the IG community and for good governance to have officials selected in accord with the 2022 law running IG offices, quietly doing whatever work they can in the face of resource constraints and threats. I conclude this because the basic alternative appears to be dozens of Trump-confirmed stalwarts who view the IG role, in the words of Health and Human Services IG T. March Bell, as investigating “to support the initiatives of President Trump” and the agency or department head.
It’s an unhappy trade-off, to be sure, from the traditional IG perspective. On this issue, despite the nominal success of the 2022 reform, and largely due to congressional acquiescence, the Trump administration is winning.
I thank Tia Sewell for her editorial assistance.