Ari Weitzman (10:22)
All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left criticizes the move, arguing Trump blatantly violated the law. Some worry the firings will allow government waste and fraud to go unchecked. Others say Trump's dis disregard for the law endangers the country. In the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus wrote, trump's Friday night massacre is blatantly illegal. The blatantly illegal action is troubling in itself. Nonpartisan inspectors general play a critical role in assuring the lawful and efficient operations of government in Democratic and Republican administrations alike. An administration supposedly focused on making government more efficient would be empowering inspectors general, not firing them en masse, marcus said. But this episode is even more alarming than that. It offers a chilling foreshadowing of Trump unbound, heedless of the rule of law and unwilling to tolerate any potential impediment to his authority. The firings don't just pose a fundamental challenge to the inspectors general and the agencies they serve. They are a threat to the authority of Congress itself. What is the point of laws if lawmakers permit them to be so cavalierly ignored? Marcus wrote. Congress and the rest of us need to closely watch what comes next. Presumably, Trump didn't remove the incumbent inspectors general just to let their deputies continue business as usual. You can weaponize these jobs, one of the ousted inspectors general told me. You can ignore bad things. You can go after the prior administration. You can try to filter or edit work that comes out. They've taken away one of the huge checks and balances. In the New York Daily News, Lucy Lang said, protect the independent US Inspectors general. If someone does something in the middle of a Friday night without a public announcement and then, when asked about it by the press, refuses to provide any details, it probably isn't something they want people to pay a lot of attention to, Lange wrote. IGs work to ensure government effectiveness and efficiency. They also serve as a bulwark against abuse and misconduct and, because of their independence, can act as reliable truth tellers in the face of controversy. Controversy we know what the lack of independent oversight looks like in other countries. In 2016, President Abdel Farah El Sisi fired and imprisoned the head of Egypt's Central Auditing Agency after publication of a report documenting widespread political corruption. Though one cannot directly link this removal to current economic instability in the country, Lang said Congress needs to stand behind the law and more. It needs to protect the independence of IGs to be effective truth tellers when it comes to efficiency and effectiveness of federal programs and protecting the federal system from fraud, waste and abuse. In Jurist News, Michael J. Kelly called the firings the beginning of Trump's assault on the rule of law. Twice stymied in his first term from asserting unfettered control over the federal government, first, by his own political appointees and career civil servants who refused to bend to his will. Second, switching from internal to external forces by using a mob to foment the January 6, 2021 insurrection which failed, President Donald Trump clearly has resolved not to be so stymied in his second term, Kelly wrote. What happens when presidents break the law? In this way, Congress has very little recourse beyond holding hearings or impeachment, neither of which a Republican Congress will be willing to undertake. While not much might happen to Trump for not following the law, either politically or legally, accepting and normalizing such behavior by our chief executive has enormous consequences for the nation. Previously, modern presidents paid prices for not following the law in a rule of law society, Kelly said. If what Trump learned to do by successfully ignoring or outrunning the law in the abbreviated version of his wilderness years, the interregnum between his terms is tolerated and allowed to take root in the Oval Office, America is in much bigger trouble than anyone realizes. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying. Which brings us to what the right is saying. The right is mixed on the move. Though many argue Trump was right to scrutinize the independent watchdog system, some say Trump is showing an indifference to the rule of law in his first week in office. Others say some of the firings are puzzling and could set up an important legal fight. In PJ Media, Matt Margolis called the firings a big move against the deep state. By definition, inspectors general are supposed to be independent federal watchdogs who are tasked with identifying and cleaning up waste and abuse in government. That's what we expect them to do. However, as Real Clear Politics reporter Susan Crabtree notes, many of the inspectors general have a track record of whitewashing reports and engaging in partisan politics where left wing officials are often given a pass, mark Olis wrote. And if you think about it, can anyone give me any examples of accountability during the Biden administration? Anyone? In 2009, Obama fired Inspector General Gerald Walpin to protect a political ally. Walpin had been investigating Obama's friend and donor Kevin Johnson, who had misused federal AmeriCorps funds by funneling them into his personal nonprofit, using the money for political activities, and even paying hush money to underage girls who had accused him of sexual abuse, Margolis said. Reports suggest that Trump did not notify Congress of his decision to fire the inspectors general as required by law. As a result, the terminations may need to undergo additional legal review and procedural steps before they are finalized. But it's clear that these deep staters need replacing in reason. Eric Boehm suggested Trump likely violated federal law. Many of those fired were Trump appointees from his first term in office. It remains unclear whether the administration plans to fill the positions with newly appointed loyalists or to leave the post vacant, Boem wrote. The firings will likely trigger an immediate legal battle over the president's authority to send inspector generals packing. A law passed by Congress in 2008 requires the White House to provide 30 days notice before removing or replacing an inspector general. An updated version of that law, passed in 2022, requires that a president provide Congress with substantive rationale, including detailed and case specific reasons for the removal. This mass dismissal comes on the heels of Trump's move earlier this week to dismiss several members from a White House board that provides oversight on privacy and civil liberties issues, including the federal government's warrantless spying program, Spohm said. So far, the second Trump administration seems less interested in draining the swamp than in pushing aside people who might sound the alarm about corruption, illegal actions and other abuses of executive power in Red State, the blogger Strife said the move throws DC Status quo into chaos. The inspectors general are allegedly independent of the administration and are supposed to root out fraud, waste, abuse and law breaking. The reality is much more checkered, strife wrote. Without playing politics, you don't achieve the political profile necessary to get a presidential appointment. The political incentive means that an IG is a double edged sword because their purported independence provides an incentive to curry favor with all parties. What makes this list so curious is that Sean O'Donnell, the EPA IG appointed by Trump's first term, was fired while the DOJ IG Michael Horowitz, who never lifted a finger to reel in Merrick Garland's massive abuses of power, was retained, as Strife said. But this move is curious if it isn't simply an impulsive act. The Trump White House may be using this court case to audition arguments that can be used on another congressional permission case, like a challenge to the Impoundment control Act of 1974. Alright, that is it for what the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to our take. Today's take was written by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, but I will be reading it in the first person. I can easily come up with a banal justification for what President Trump is doing, and I think I can understand these moves from his perspective. However, I also find these actions very concerning and I am very leery of what could come next. First, the justification. During his first term in office, Trump was famously plagued by powerful staffers actively resisting his agenda. In a then anonymous 2018 op ed in the New York Times, former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor described how he and others resisted President Trump internally, creating what he called a two track presidency, where the administration's actions often contradicted the president's statements in order to really enact his agenda the second time around. Trump has good reason for dismantling the structures that could get in his way, reclassifying as many as 50,000 employees or more to Schedule F to allow him to remove them at will, and firing inspectors general who in the past have scrutinized his operations and whom he's accused of holding partisan motivations. As an example, Trump issued an executive order in his first week blocking new federal rules and regulations in all agencies where Trump's appointed agency chief is not yet on the job. Nigs could easily block that agenda from being implemented. Once we start thinking about these decisions from Trump's point of view as cutting the red tape that strangled his first term, we can see a pretty justifiable course of action. Decisions like removing inspectors general and firing members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board make sense from that perspective. We can also see these decisions as an extension of Trump's mandate he ran on Fundamentally reorganizing the federal government and keeping existing roles and mechanisms for internal oversight could arguably be made redundant by a new Department of Government Efficiency, or doge. But justifying these actions from Trump's point of view is very different from justifying them to the American people. And I don't think that the president's current strategy is justifiable for three reasons. These moves are actually going to make the government less efficient, they're a less effective use for his agenda, and he's now inviting more corruption and more politicization into our government. First, if Trump follows through on reorganizing the government by pursuing the same all out blitz strategy he's enacting with immigration policy, clearing out potentially obstinate and partisan federal employees with a bulldozer rather than with measured consideration, he'll probably do more to create a hobbled and ineffective government than a smaller, more efficient one. Remember, Trump tried to redesignate federal employees to at will employment at the end of his last term, and since then a University of Texas study found that such a move was likely to degrade government performance. Second, if this is a reorganization effort, it strikes me as a poor one. I don't know that Trump will export oversight of these agencies to Doge, but if that is his plan, then I think it's misguided. These IGs are important backstops of corruption. Doge, meanwhile, can focus on finding fat to trim, starting with the departments that have the most government employees, the Departments of Defense, Veterans affairs, and Homeland Security, which employ about half of the federal workforce between the three of them. The Pentagon has long been plagued by bloat, and other Republican lawmakers have already introduced legislation to modernize software systems in the VA to make it more efficient. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security has been ramping up domestic surveillance programs for years, despite the federal government already having a Central Intelligence Agency, a Federal Bureau of Investigation, a National Security Agency, and a Secret Service that all have intelligence gathering as part of their purview. Why not start there? Which brings me to my third point. Corruption. Remember that Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that Trump fired members from? Its job is to look into government infringement on civil liberties like illegal domestic surveillance, and it's now inoperable and remember that the DHS is growing in surveillance programs and that the federal government already has a dark history of spying on US Citizens. If you're concerned about the potential for government overreach, I think what Trump did is just give you more reason to be concerned. Yes, firing these inspectors general does appear illegal and could well be overturned in court. But that illegality isn't my biggest issue with it. My biggest problem is that these are the people whose job it is to investigate and report on impropriety in their agencies. And Trump just fired at least 17 of them en masse, with no clear reason and no communicated plan to replace them. If and or when he does give the Senate its legal notice and he does remove these inspectors general, who's going to stop these agencies from becoming ineffective, unrestrained and filled with unscrupulous yes men? Last Wednesday we scathed President Biden on his way out the door for adding another link to the chain of hyper partisanship in government. Now Trump's taking steps that could easily add another link to that chain. Maybe the president only wants to cut bloat quickly and decisively and reorganize the way government oversight is done, but he's paving the way for a politicized bureaucracy with fewer checks on corruption and moves like illegally clearing out independent watchdogs of federal agencies put us on high alert for what's next to come.
