Trump has declared war on inspectors general
The system can still be saved. But their struggle for independence didn't begin with the current president.
Read the full story at The Washington Post
It’s open season on the nation’s inspectors general, or so it seems. In the span of weeks, President Trump has ousted several IGs—most recently Steve Linick at the State Department, who was investigating questionable arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s possible use of official staff to perform personal chores. Has Trump killed the IG system? He removed Michael Atkinson last month from his position as inspector general for the intelligence community—possibly for notifying Congress about the Ukraine whistleblower—and, on May 15, pushed out the acting inspector general at the Transportation Department. He has ousted officials in similar roles at the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services.
We’ve belatedly discovered that the supposed autonomy of inspectors general—semi-independent officials who scour governmental agencies for waste and fraud—relied too heavily on presidential self-restraint, a quality Trump is not known for. “If cabinet members can remove IGs who are investigating them, and presidents can summarily dismiss IGs simply because they were appointed by a predecessor, it completely guts the point of the law,” tweeted David Axelrod, an Obama administration advisor. After all, how much waste, fraud, and abuse can inspectors general uncover when their irksome inquests cost them their jobs?
