Republican senators who press President Trump to stop undermining agency inspectors general are absolutely right. Inspectors general are a crucial means for Congress and the president alike to provide oversight of the sprawling federal bureaucracy, and thus to save taxpayers from waste and fraud.
Trump has been leading something of a war against inspectors general for several months now, with little regard for the spirit of the laws governing those jobs and almost no appreciation for their utility or importance. His various moves against existing inspectors general drew mild early pushback from a few senators of both parties, but it wasn’t clear if the pushback would continue.
Now Politico reports that even Republican senators continue to press Trump to change his attitudes and actions on this front. Leading the way has been veteran Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who long has been the Senate’s foremost advocate of inspectors general. Grassley, though, isn’t the only one.
“We need to empower inspectors general to be able to do their work — especially when you’re dealing with trillions of dollars, you’ve got to have good, reasonable oversight over those things,” said Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford in a public interview after sending a letter to the president on the topic. Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman joined Lankford’s letter, which said it is in the best interest of the White House to “work with IGs, not against them.”
Trump’s most flagrant action on this front came in firing Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community, as payback for Atkinson forwarding to Congress the whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine.
“Trump has yet to respond to Grassley’s bipartisan letter demanding a fuller explanation for the termination of Atkinson,” reported Politico.
“That’s not really giving Congress the ability to understand the reason,” Lankford said of Trump’s stonewalling. “When the Obama administration did that, they followed back up and said, ‘Here’s why, here’s what.’ We expect the Trump administration to be able to do the same.”
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is really important. I can say from first-hand experience as a federal agency employee (decades ago, but the experience remains relevant) that just the knowledge of an inspector general poking around is enough to catalyze civil servants to be more diligent and productive. And that’s just a matter of work pace for honest employees: The threat from inspectors is far greater for would-be scofflaws, certainly keeping some of them from transgressing in the first place.
Those who argue that the president can do whatever he wants with executive branch employees are dead wrong. The positions are created by congressional act, and Congress possesses long-recognized oversight authority over them. That’s why the vast bulk of agency employees enjoy civil-service protections: so that a president cannot fire them willy-nilly, without cause.
Presidentially appointed inspectors general, it is true, occupy a sort of strangely intermediate position between civil servants and a president’s political appointees. Their jobs, though, remain crucial, and a large degree of independence from political influence is essential for those jobs to be done right.
That’s why it’s encouraging to see senators of both parties continuing to demand answers from Trump on this front. If he doesn’t provide such answers, the senators should go beyond mere letter-writing and use other leverage, as members of a co-equal branch of government, to make Trump pay for his abuses.
