Trump’s Mass Firing of Inspectors General Bulldozed the Way for Elon Musk’s Unaccountable Shadow Government
A functional Congress would have impeached the president for deliberately flouting the law
Four days after taking office on a late Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump fired 17 inspectors general from a cross-section of federal agencies. That set a new record at one more than the number that Ronald Reagan fired upon taking office in 1981.
However, there are crucial differences between Trump’s dismissals and those of prior presidents. Trump’s order directly contravenes the mandated removal process for inspectors general while undermining the non-partisan independence of these vital government watchdogs. This is a clear violation of the Inspector General Act, which was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1978. Carter’s intent was to instill public confidence in the probity and efficiency of government in the aftermath of multiple scandals at federal agencies during the Richard Nixon administration. It was, in the words of a Carter administration official, meant to address “the abuse of power” and the “misuse of the IRS and the CIA against domestic enemies.”
But Trump isn’t just ignoring the law, he has turned it on its head to vest supra-constitutional powers in Elon Musk.
Replacing Lawful IGs With an Unaccountable Oligarch
Presidents do have the power to replace inspectors general—even if Trump failed to follow the proper process for doing so. But the even more serious constitutional issue is who has functionally replaced those inspectors general. Our system of independent IGs—in which all of them go through a Senate confirmation process and are somewhat insulated from executive pressure—is tasked with looking for evidence of fraud, waste, and abuse in federal agencies. But they are now being replaced with a shadow agency headed by Musk, a super-inspector general who is accountable to nobody other than the president himself.
Musk has created a team of former private sector employees and Silicon Valley programmers under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which, despite its name, is not an official, Cabinet-level department. Musk claims DOGE will cut two trillion dollars in government waste and fraud, but it might actually be a way for Musk to remove government officials who have hindered his private companies and to target officials who do not politically align with the president. In that case, DOGE would just swap government waste, fraud, and abuse with corruption, self-dealing, and abuse.
Musk is acting like an inspector general despite having no legal authority to do so. And he is doing it in direct contravention of Congress’s confirmation power over major presidential appointments. That turns Trump’s flouting of this law into an impeachable offense on par with that once leveled at President Nixon.
If that all sounds incredible, start by looking at the justifications offered for firing the inspectors general by administration officials, and then compare those statements to the law. The email sent to notify the IGs that they were being fired was terse, just two sentences, and the only justification given was the president’s “changing priorities.” When queried, a senior White House official said only that they were “cleaning house of what doesn’t work for us going forward” and that the current IGs do not “align” with the administration’s goals. Trump’s own brief comment on the firings was that “it’s a very common thing to do” and “some people thought that some [IGs] were unfair or were not doing the job.”
But both the suddenness of the firings and the vagueness of the justifications offered are a violation of the law upholding our system of inspectors general. Trump is essentially turning back the clock to before the late-1970s, when presidents from both parties frequently weaponized federal agencies to target their political opponents.
In particular, the inspector general system was created in response to the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation. When his attorney general refused to fire the special prosecutor who had subpoenaed the damning Oval Office tapes that would have exposed Nixon’s involvement in the coverup, Nixon had the attorney general fired and replaced. His replacement also refused to comply, and also was then fired. The third functionary—future failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork—finally complied. Historians still remember Nixon’s actions that day as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”
A federal court ruled the dismissal to be illegal and an outraged Congress promptly launched the investigation into Watergate which ultimately pressured Nixon to resign a year later. Firing a special prosecutor was the last straw that led to Nixon’s impeachment. And inspectors general were created in imitation of special prosecutors as a position within the federal government that could operate at least semi-independently from presidential power to provide a check on abuses within the executive branch. Thus, Trump’s firing of the inspectors general is as directly a challenge to government accountability as was Nixon’s firing of the special prosecutor and the attorneys general.
Good Governance Out, Corruption In
The 1978 Inspector General Act was designed to insulate inspectors general from executive manipulation by requiring them to report to Congress. When an inspector general completes an investigation, they turn the report over to their agency head, who is allowed to offer comments on the report but who must turn the report over to Congress within seven days. In other words, agency leadership, which serves at the pleasure of the president, is not allowed to squelch the findings of their inspector general even when their findings are embarrassing to the agency or to the administration more generally.
This, as you can imagine, makes inspectors general unpopular with the White House. They are usually career civil servants—unlike the agency heads—and their reports are frequently a public relations liability. And since most IGs are holdovers from previous administrations, it is easy to suspect them of working against the interests of the current administration.
As a result, past presidents have attempted to wipe the slate clean by firing IGs. Reagan tried to remove 16 in 1981, although he was then pressured to rehire five by Congress. George W. Bush tried again in 2002, although he ultimately fired only two. Obama fired one. As a Bush administration official put it, presidents want someone who won’t “constantly play ‘gotcha’” or get “a little too enamored of their independent status” or “hurt the agency.” In this framing, IGs are not meant to prevent fraud and abuse per se; they are “there to help the agency.” Implicitly, that means making the agency—and, by extension, the administration—look good and not bad.
However, unlike with Trump’s dismissals, these earlier removals were legal because in the text of the 1978 law, Congress had assumed that presidents would not simply fire inspectors general because of the poor optics of removing government watchdogs. It signaled having something to hide to a public that had grown leery of White House abuses.
Clearly, that was insufficient incentive. And so in 2008, in response to Bush’s IG firings, the law was amended to require the president to provide Congress with 30 days of notice before actually removing an inspector general from office. The bill was co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who also included stipulations that ensured that inspectors general could hire independent legal counsel and that their operating budgets could not be cut in retaliation by vindictive agency heads.
Late in his first term, Trump fired five IGs in a way that complied with the letter of the regulations but violated the spirit of the law. The first victim was Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, who, ironically, had been appointed to that position by Trump himself. But Atkinson drew Trump’s ire by forwarding a whistleblower complaint to Congress. That complaint—about Trump putting pressure on Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden—ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment. (The other four IGs were fired after writing critical reports on the administration’s Covid pandemic response and for investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s use of agency resources for personal benefit.)
Trump complained at the time that Atkinson must not have been “a big Trump fan”—despite being a Trump nominee—because he had not offered Trump the courtesy of coming to see him in person about the whistleblower report before handing it over to Congress. “How can you do that without seeing the person?” Of course, Atkinson had simply been doing what the 1978 law obligated him to do. He was supposed to identify and forward information about potential waste, fraud, and abuse to Congress without, absurdly, having to clear that information with the person alleged to be responsible for that abuse or fraud! While it may have technically been legal for Trump to retaliate against an inspector general who had just been doing his job and who had refused to be swayed by partisan considerations, it was certainly unethical.
Trump: Even More Lawless Than Last Time
In response to the firings, Congress amended the law again in 2022, requiring the president to provide a “substantive rationale,” including “detailed and case-specific reasons” for firing an IG when giving its 30-day notice of intent to Congress. This would, ostensibly, raise the political costs of firing an inspector general by forcing the administration to provide a concrete explanation that could be analyzed and critiqued by Congress and the public.
What has changed in 2025 is that the second Trump administration has directly flouted the same rules that the first Trump administration had abided by. This time, the administration provided no 30-day notice to Congress. And it has offered no substantive reason for the firings. Trump’s “Friday Afternoon Massacre” is as intentional a violation of the law by an administration as any in U.S. history, and even more clearly a violation than Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” Trump is all but daring Congress or the courts to stop him.
It is possible, although not certain, that the courts could find even such mild restrictions—the 30-day notice and “substantive rationale” requirements—to be a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Appointments Clause, which gives an executive broad authority in the personnel matters of the executive branch. Prior cases, like Myers v. United States, have established that formal advice and consent of the Senate is stipulated only for presidential appointments, not for removals.
But what is indefensible would be a president sidestepping the Senate’s appointment powers by, first, removing watchdog officials that have gone through the proper channels and, second, informally vesting those same powers instead in an unelected and non-confirmed private citizen. Even if the courts were to rule that the removal of the inspectors general was constitutional, the appointment of Musk as a substitute would remain a direct violation of the Senate’s authority.
Musk’s shadow organization, DOGE, is not a federal executive agency, and thus not accountable to Congress; instead, Musk took over and renamed the United States Digital Service, which had been little more than an IT consulting committee established by the Obama White House, as Andy Craig has written here. Yet, through DOGE, Musk has seized for himself not just the kinds of powers previously delegated to inspectors general but a position functionally above even agency heads themselves.
IGs are allowed to access agency data and communications, interview employees, and issue reports free from agency interference. Musk’s DOGE is exercising similar powers but taking them even further, seemingly acting as a back door for controlling executive agencies, accessing sensitive government databases, and surveilling and intimidating both federal employees and receipts of federal funding.
Musk’s Breathtaking and Lawless Power Grab
To provide just one example, DOGE staffers demanded that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) give them access to the agency’s databases, which include classified information. When the staff refused, DOGE flunkies threatened to summon the U.S. Marshals Service to force them to comply or face arrest. When they refused again, the agency’s director of security was placed on leave. Musk himself, in the middle of the conflict, posted on X, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
The reality is that USAID is an actual executive agency with its own duly appointed inspector general; but Musk is bypassing the inspector general and acting as if DOGE is not merely an advisory committee but is instead some kind of supra-agency that can operate above the law and beyond congressional oversight. His team of unvetted operatives, half a dozen of whom are 19- to 25-year-olds with vague titles, are bullying career government officials. All in order to provide their boss—a possible security risk due to his drug use and contacts with foreign officials—with access to USAID databases that include classified information, perhaps in service of Musk and Trump’s stated desire to shut down the entire agency.
Musk is publicly bragging about his access to information that he has no legal right to access. When DOGE came knocking at the U.S. Treasury and demanded database access, senior Treasury official David Lebryk resigned in protest, leading to a taunting tweet from Musk accusing the Treasury Department of funding known frauds and terrorists. Whether or not that is true, investigating such allegations is the job of the Treasury’s inspector general and not the CEO of the company formerly known as Twitter, let alone the likes of the DOGE staffer formerly known as “BigBalls.”
The Trump administration has gutted the inspector general system, with all its inconvenient requirements for transparency and accountability, and functionally replaced it with an unaccountable, shadowy, Musk-led organization over which Congress has no oversight.
But a demoralized and delinquent Congress, controlled by Trump’s party, has showed no will to stop this internal executive coup or to defend its own legislative prerogatives. Even Grassley, who authored the inspector general law, has only passively asked for “further explanation from President Trump.” Other Republican senators have been unable to summon even this much outrage. South Carolina’s Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham acknowledged that the firings broke the law but meekly and merely suggested that the administration “follow the law next time.”
Unlike in the 1970s, Congress today is asleep at the wheel. Nixon’s actions against a single government official sparked a congressional reaction that led to his impeachment and a wave of good governance reforms, including the creation of the inspectors general. Now, the most openly authoritarian president since Nixon fires a dozen and a half such officials in direct contravention of those reforms, and yet the most Congress can muster is a yawn.
There is another echo of the past in this current scandal. When President George W. Bush fired two inspectors general in 2002, he was following the advice of a white paper written by the Heritage Foundation just prior to his inauguration. The authors, who later took positions within the Office of Personnel Management, wanted to “reassert managerial control of government” and fire any officials who failed to support “the president’s election-endorsed and value-defined program.”
When President Trump purged the inspectors general, he was following the advice given in another project facilitated by the Heritage Foundation. That project, the notorious Project 2025, called for Trump to fire every inspector general and replace them with “their own IGs” in order to circumvent congressional oversight and give the administration “control of the people that work within government.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s allies at the Office of Personnel Management are doing their best to cut any programs and purge any officials that stand in opposition to the president’s agenda.
Trump could have chosen to fight waste, fraud, and abuse through legal channels. He could have chosen to respect the constitutional division between the branches of government. He could have tasked his agency heads to work with their inspectors general to root out budgetary excess and remove incompetent workers. But Trump did not do any of that.
Instead, he chose to work outside the law and invest supra-constitutional power in Elon Musk, an unelected, unvetted, and unconfirmed individual who has created a shadow executive agency that operates beyond accountability or oversight.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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"When DOGE came knocking at the U.S. Treasury and demanded database access, senior Treasury official David Lebryk resigned in protest, leading to a taunting tweet from Musk accusing the Treasury Department of funding known frauds and terrorists. "
What Musk says is beyond wrong, it's a category error. BFS is a payment system. Agencies issue the pay orders and certify the funds. Agencies twice run payees through Treasury's Do Not Pay system. BFS checks again to make sure the recipients aren't dead. BFS does not have the authority to unilaterally veto payments it doesn't like, and Musk is cleary indicating he will have it do exactly that if he's able.
Interesting. No mention of Obama's weaponization of the IRS, DOJ, FBI, etc. Also no mention of Obama's IG scandal: " Obama's unilateral decision to fire Gerald Walpin, the Inspector General of AmeriCorps. An inspector general's job is to investigate for waste, fraud or abuse of federal funds. Walpin had recently investigated Kevin Johnson, an Obama supporter, and the nonprofit St. HOPE Academy that Johnson headed. Walpin found six instances of funds being diverted or wrongly used, none of which were disputed by Johnson. Walpin handed his findings over to the DOJ. The DOJ then found sufficient cause to order St. Hope to repay about half of nearly $847,000 in federal grants they had received from AmeriCorps. On the heels of that, not only did Obama act to fire Walpin, but Obama failed to comply with an act he voted for last year meant to protect Inspector Generals from political pressure."