Independent watchdogs summarily dismissed by Donald Trump have denounced the move as illegal and a threat to democracy that paves the way for the appointment of “political lackeys” and widespread institutional corruption.
The sacking of the 18 inspectors general from federal agencies last Friday, including the departments of defence, energy and state, has also been widely condemned as illegal, and as part of the Project 2025 plan for a rightwing authoritarian takeover of government.
Hannibal “Mike” Ware, who was the inspector general for the Small Business Administration until his sudden firing, told MSNBC that the dismissals were anti-democratic because they ride roughshod over a law requiring the president to give Congress 30 days’ notice and the reasoning for any such move.
“This is not about any of our individual jobs. We acknowledge that the president has the right to remove any of us that he chooses. But the protections that were baked into the act is everything, absent having to provide a real reason. We’re looking at what amounts to a threat to democracy, a threat to independent oversight, and a threat to transparency in government,” he said.
The office of inspector general was created in 1976 to provide a check on abuse of government following the Watergate scandal.
In 2022, Congress strengthened an existing law preventing the arbitrary removal of inspectors general for political ends, and their replacement with officials who were not independent of the White House, in response to Trump firings during his first term. These included the dismissals of inspectors general investigating the secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and the transportation secretary Elaine Chao, and their replacement with loyalists who quashed the investigations.
Ware has written to the White House director of presidential personnel, Sergio Gor, accusing him of failing to follow the law in dismissing the officials by email late on Friday without notice.
Ware, who is chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, told Gor that legislation requires Trump to provide a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for removing inspectors general from their posts.
“I recommend that you reach out to White House counsel to discuss your intended course of action. At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed inspectors general,” wrote Ware.
The former interior department inspector general Mark Greenblatt told CNN he received a two-line notification of his dismissal late on Friday night that offered no explanation beyond “changing priorities”.
Greenblatt, who was appointed to the post by Trump in 2019, said the removals “should be setting off alarm bells”.
“The whole construct of inspectors general, it’s based on us being independent, that we’re not beholden to a political party of any stripe, that we are there as the taxpayers’ representatives to call balls and strikes without any dog in the fight. And so the question is: what will President Trump do with these positions? Is he going to nominate watchdogs or is he going to nominate lapdogs?” he said.
“If he goes down a path of nominating and appointing political lackeys, then I think the American taxpayers, Congress, stakeholders throughout the country, should be up in arms.”
The move has also met with denunciation from members of Congress and others as an attempt by Trump to avoid scrutiny and accountability as he seeks to remake the federal government in support of a corporate, anti-regulatory agenda while cutting support for the poor and vulnerable.
Trump is not the first president to dismiss inspectors general wholesale on taking office. Ronald Reagan and George W Bush both did so but were forced to back down, at least in part.
Norman Eisen, a former White House ethics lawyer in the Obama administration, told the Guardian that the dismissals fitted a broader pattern of actions by Trump who “promised to be a dictator on day one”.
“He has carried that forward every day since taking office,” he said.
“The definition of dictatorship is making your own whims the law and Trump’s actions here are blatantly illegal … Trump is flouting the statutory requirements to test just how far he can push the limits because, plain and simple, he doesn’t want the oversight that IGs provide.”
Eisen said he expected Trump’s move to be challenged in the courts in line with lawsuits against “other initial, unlawful actions since he assumed the presidency” such as his order attempting to overturn the constitutional protection of birthright citizenship.
The watchdog group Public Citizen said that the removal of the independent inspectors was part of the Project 2025 plan for a rightwing authoritarian takeover of all aspects of government. It pointed to a Project 2025 training video last year that said Trump should install his “own IGs” so that he has “control of the people that work within the government”.
The author of a Public Citizen report on the plan, Jon Golinger, described the removal of the inspectors general as “a watchdog wipeout cooked up by corporate lobbyists that knocks down the walls that keep corruption from running rampant”.
