Trump fired government watchdogs en masse. Corruption and abuse are sure to follow

In 2019, President Donald Trump appointed a lawyer named Mark Lee Greenblatt to root out fraud, abuse, and corruption in the Department of the Interior. Greenblatt quickly got to work, directing his 270 staff members to conduct audits, inspections, and investigations across the agency of 70,000 federal employees, which oversees 30% of the United States’s natural resources, 20% of its public lands, and its relationships with 573 Native American tribes and villages.

He found that a gas marketing outfit conspired to defraud oil and gas companies on leased federal land, a Bureau of Land Management employee viewed pornography on a government computer, a tribal police officer stole $40,000 earmarked for a tribal youth diversion program, and three offshore oil rig workers and three companies acted negligently in a 2012 incident that resulted in a deadly explosion. And that was just in the span of two months in 2019.

Until last week, Greenblatt was one of 73 inspectors general working within the United States government—independent watchdogs that keep tabs on federal agencies, which all in all collect more than $4 trillion in revenue every year and spend more than $6 trillion. On Friday night, he and 17 of his colleagues were summarily dismissed, in contravention of U.S. law. “President Trump fired me last night,” Greenblatt wrote in a post on LinkedIn over the weekend. “It’s all just so surreal.”

The firings leave the Department of Interior, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other departments that shape the country’s environmental and climate policy without independent oversight. This comes at a moment of extreme tumult and uncertainty as Trump attempts to transform the federal government in his image. In his first several days in office, the Trump administration instructed federal health agencies to temporarily stop communicating with the public and ordered a freeze on the disbursal of federal grants, though that order was later rescinded.

“All of this is so corrosive,” said an EPA employee who asked Grist not to name them out of fear of retaliation. Trump is “corrupting the health of every federal office with paranoia and distrust. How is anyone supposed to operate under such conditions?”

Legal experts and nonprofit groups suspect Trump will replace the fired inspectors general with devotees who will ignore malfeasance, corruption, and abuse—a shift that would put the country’s environmental policies and American public health at risk. “Trump’s effort to terminate the current roster of IGs and, if one allows oneself to speculate, install loyalists who will turn a blind eye to what is to come, is unprecedented and profoundly troubling,” said Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Federal employees at regional offices and agency headquarters in Washington, D.C. fear their internal reports and complaints will be ignored or dismissed outright, putting Americans at risk. One important role of inspectors general is to offer federal employees protection if they experience reprisal at work after reporting corruption or impropriety. EPA scientists who raised alarms in 2019 and 2020 about the agency improperly downgrading the cancer risks of chemicals, for example, called their inspector general hotline to report that they were retaliated against by their own agency for blowing the whistle.

Sean O’Donnell, who Trump appointed as the EPA’s inspector general in 2020, launched an investigation to determine whether there had been a violation of these employees’ rights under U.S. whistleblower protection law and found that three of the five scientists had had their requests for vacation time rejected, monetary awards withheld, and arbitrarily received poor performance reviews. The office of the inspector general recommended that the EPA administrator “consider appropriate corrective action.”

O’Donnell, who has been scrupulous about monitoring the disbursal of funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act passed under former president Joe Biden was one of the 18 inspectors general fired by Trump last week.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which authorized more than $300 billion in clean energy incentives and grants, allocates money to support independent oversight of this spending, including new funding for inspector general offices. The majority of the funding from that law has already been disbursed, and Trump has moved to freeze what remains as he attempts to restructure the government. Legal experts say that move is illegal and unconstitutional, but even if a judge lifts the freeze, the watchdogs tasked with scrutinizing these funds will no longer be at their posts.

“All of the checks and balances have been stripped,” said Kyla Bennett, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group that offers pro bono assistance to whistleblowers within federal agencies. Federal employees, she added, “can’t do the work that they need to do to protect the American people. And that is the point.”

The president downplayed the firings over the weekend. “It’s a very standard thing to do,” he told reporters. But the only other president who fired more than a dozen inspectors general in one go was Ronald Reagan, and Congress has since imposed restrictions on abrupt changes to these positions. Burger explained that the dismissals are “in violation of the law, which requires notice, and an explanation to Congress.” The White House is supposed to give 30 days warning before removing an inspector general.

The firings disturbed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle., “I don’t understand why one would fire individuals whose mission is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse,” Republican Senator Susan Collins, from Maine, told Politico. Senator Elizabeth Warren, from Massachusetts, said in a post on X that Trump is “paving the way for widespread corruption,” and many other prominent Democrats voiced similar concerns.

Many Republican members of Congress, however, were unruffled. “He’s the boss,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, told Politico. “We need to clean house.”

This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.