Trump’s Illegal Firing of Inspectors General

Late on Friday night during President Trump’s first week in office, following days of highly publicized executive actions taking aim at immigrants, LGBTQ+ Americans, and federal workers, 17 federal inspectors general were summarily fired without explanation or proper notice to Congress.

Inspectors general — nonpartisan officials charged with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuses of office at their respective agencies — are crucial components of proper government oversight and a healthy democracy. By design, they are independent watchdogs that protect taxpayer money from being spent corruptly or inefficiently, without regard or loyalty to any presidential administration’s political whims.

But these watchdogs have long been a target of a president openly disdainful of oversight. In April 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic and in another late-Friday firing, Trump ousted the intelligence community inspector general who had shared with Congress the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s corrupt dealings with Ukraine. He followed that action with a series of other Friday night firings, including of Christi Grimm of the Department of Health and Human Services, who had issued a report about pandemic supply and testing shortages, and of Steve Linick, who was investigating alleged misconduct by then-Secretary Mike Pompeo. He had also removed the inspector general overseeing $2 trillion in pandemic aid.

Trump’s 2025 purge of more than a dozen inspectors general — along with more firings in the weeks after — continued that trend. Certain fired inspectors general had previously looked into or were actively investigating matters that could affect the business interests of billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk, whom Trump chose to oversee the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. This included Defense Department Inspector General Robert Storch, whose office had in late 2024 opened a review of SpaceX’s compliance with federal reporting protocols intended to protect state secrets. The office of Phyllis Fong, the inspector general of the Department of Agriculture, who was also fired, had in 2022 launched an investigation of Musk’s Neuralink startup. Also among those fired were the Labor Department’s Larry Turner and the Transportation Department’s Eric Soskin, both from agencies that had previously investigated or had fined Musk companies.

In early February, Trump fired Paul Martin, the inspector general assigned to the U.S. Agency for International Development, after his office released a report detailing the potential consequences of the administration’s dismantling of the agency. Martin’s office had also been investigating the agency’s sending of Musk-owned Starlink internet terminals to Ukraine. No reason was given for his termination. That same month, the inspector general at the National Archives — whose office had referred to the Justice Department the case of Trump’s alleged mishandling of presidential documents — left amid a major shakeup brought by the president’s attempt to politicize the nonpartisan agency responsible for maintaining our nation’s history.

Eight fired inspectors general sued the Trump administration in February, asking a federal judge to declare their firings unlawful and to restore their positions. In March, Trump nominated Thomas March Bell, a Republican attorney who has a history of investigating abortion clinics and was once accused of mishandling taxpayer money, as inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services.

The political independence of inspectors general — and thus their ability to act in the interest of the public, and not the president or agency heads — is crucial for their ability to safeguard government programs that affect millions of Americans. In 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general office found that the water contamination crisis in Flint, Mich., was worsened by the agency’s failure to respond quickly and decisively. In recent years, inspectors general have examined staffing shortages at air traffic control centers operated by the Federal Aviation Administration, investigated whether the Defense Department was properly accounting for funds used to support Ukraine, oversaw congressional Covid-19 relief spending, and uncovered massive pandemic-era fraud in the Small Business Administration.

As with the firings in 2020, Trump’s January 2025 firings defied an important provision of the 1978 Inspector General Act requiring presidents to provide Congress with 30 days’ notice of any removals. The law was amended in 2022 to require that notice also include a substantive explanation and case-specific reasons for the removal or transfer of an inspector general.

The firings of the 17 inspectors general without explanation or notice is not only a brazen violation of the law, but a clear signal of Trump’s intent to evade the systems in place to hold him and his administration accountable to the American people. American Oversight immediately filed dozens of Freedom of Information requests to several agencies for related communications with the Trump transition team, the White House, or Congress. Requests went to the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, HHS, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, the Interior, State, the Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and Transportation, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and Social Security Administration.

Inspectors general are a vital component of an accountable government and a strong democracy, and American Oversight will update this page with its findings and actions as it fights back against efforts to undermine those critical protections.