Trump Fired 17 Inspectors General in One Day; His Replacements Cut Warnings and Closed Investigations

An Email at 7:37 p.m.

At 7:37 p.m. on Friday, January 24, 2025, an email from the White House personnel director reached Phyllis Fong, the Agriculture Department's inspector general for 22 years: "On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that due to changing priorities your position as Inspector General of the United States Department of Agriculture is terminated, effective immediately."¹²

Trump fired 17 inspectors general that day, the officials who investigate waste, fraud, and abuse inside federal agencies.² Eight of them, Fong included, later sued; their complaint reproduces her email.¹

Trump did the firing, and he chose the people who did the rest.¹³⁴ Under them, the Veterans Affairs watchdog ended its public preliminary alerts, and the office that protects federal workers closed investigations into their dismissals.⁴³

Congress created inspectors general in 1978, after Watergate, to investigate government programs and keep Congress informed, and required appointments based on integrity and demonstrated ability, not political affiliation.² In May 2025, Democratic staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee compiled the work of 19 offices whose leaders Trump had removed, counting later dismissals.⁵ They put the monetary impact of that work in fiscal 2024, the fiscal year before the firings, at more than $50 billion, combining potential audit savings with investigative recoveries.⁵ One example from the report: Defense investigators assisted a case against an Army financial counselor who defrauded Gold Star families, producing a sentence of more than 12 years and $1.4 million in forfeiture.⁵

The Inspector General Act (IGA) requires 30 days' advance written notice to both houses of Congress, with a substantive rationale and detailed, case-specific reasons for removal.¹⁶ Trump gave no such notice, and the government has never disputed it.²⁷

A Warning, Then a Firing

On February 10, 2025, USAID Inspector General Paul Martin's office warned about $8.2 billion in obligated but undisbursed humanitarian funds and said existing oversight controls had become largely nonoperational after the administration's aid pause and staffing actions.⁸ The counter-terrorism vetting unit could no longer vet aid partners after its staff were sidelined, the advisory reported, and the aid pause had suspended all third-party monitoring contracts and activities.⁸

More than $489 million in food assistance faced spoilage, extra storage costs, and diversion: risks the advisory identified, not documented losses.⁸ The advisory also said USAID's safeguards already had shortcomings, including vulnerabilities in preventing aid diversion to terrorist organizations in Gaza.⁸

Trump fired Martin a day after the warning, NOTUS reported.⁵⁴

What VA Stopped Publishing and Telling Congress

Veterans Affairs shows what one replacement did with the office. Trump fired the inspector general there and chose Cheryl Mason, a former chair of the Board of Veterans' Appeals who had been VA Secretary Doug Collins' senior adviser.⁴⁹

Mason eliminated the public preliminary alerts her office had issued on particularly alarming concerns; she confirmed the change to NOTUS and called the alerts burdensome and not impactful.⁴ She acted after Collins' office complained that the alerts distracted senior staff, NOTUS reported on August 21, 2026, citing two people familiar with the decision.⁴ Ending a public alert removes a warning that veterans and Congress could otherwise read.⁴

NOTUS also reported that Mason delayed electronic-health-record reports and limited discussion of staffing shortages, citing demands from the department.⁴ In at least one case, NOTUS reported from draft copies, she removed entire sections about how the loss of primary-care physicians affected VA's system before publication; she said the material exceeded the report's scope.⁴

Congress lost its advance notice: before Mason, the office gave Congress's veterans committees a week's notice and offered briefings on nonroutine reports, a Senate aide told NOTUS.⁴ Mason ended that, the outlet reported, with two people saying she told employees the change was at Collins' request.⁴ She confirmed that she now briefs the committees only as reports are released and only if members ask.⁴

Mason said her office has maintained its independence and that she alone has final decision-making authority.⁴ The White House called Trump's nominees highly qualified and said: "The president is restoring integrity and transparency to our federal government."⁴ At VA, what Mason herself confirmed points the other way.⁴

From Protecting Employees to Closing Their Claims

Morgan Saladino, a Commerce employee, and Cheryl Healy, an HHS employee, lost the investigations into their dismissals after Trump changed the leadership of one agency.³ The Office of Special Counsel investigates prohibited personnel practices and can ask the Merit Systems Protection Board to protect federal workers while it investigates.³

Trump fired its leader, Hampton Dellinger, on February 7, 2025.³ A district court restored him, but an appeals court stayed that order on March 5, he dropped his challenge, and the appeals court later vacated the district court opinion.³²

While temporarily back, Dellinger sought relief for dismissed probationary employees, and board member Cathy Harris granted his office a 45-day stay of qualifying Agriculture Department terminations.³¹⁰ The department's list named 5,692 employees, with the count still changing.¹⁰ Harris found reasonable grounds to believe those terminations violated 5 U.S.C. § 2302(b)(12), which bars certain personnel practices; the stay was temporary, not a final merits ruling.¹⁰

Trump replaced Dellinger with Jamieson Greer, and the office reversed its legal position: on April 8, 2025, it directed staff to close ongoing investigations of the mass probationary terminations.³ Saladino and Healy received notices saying their dismissals more likely reflected the administration's workforce priorities than a decision personal to an employee.³

The two sued, and on August 24, 2026, Judge Carl Nichols dismissed their case for lack of jurisdiction: closing an investigation was not an injury a court could recognize, and his court could not redress their terminations.³ He did not decide whether the directive or the dismissals were lawful.³

Fewer Reports, and Work That Continued

The offices kept working: staff at one whose inspector general had been fired told bipartisan Senate committee staff, "our work continues unfettered."⁵ In September 2025, Judge Ana Reyes, who heard the fired inspectors general's lawsuit, found that acting inspectors general still led the offices and no institutional collapse was imminent.²

But the same Senate report quotes an anonymous employee of one office: "we were told OIG wasn’t going to do anything to contradict DOGE."⁵ At Labor, Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito, a former Republican congressman, fired the career official who headed investigations almost immediately after taking office, NOTUS reported, citing two people familiar with the move.⁴ That official had been leading a probe into an alleged inappropriate relationship between then-Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and a staffer; the outlet did not report that the probe was dropped.⁴ And across Cabinet-department inspector general offices, the Partnership for Public Service found that audit reports fell an average of 15% and investigative reports 25% in the first half of fiscal 2026 against the first halves of 2020-2024; it counted reports without measuring their quality or isolating the firings from staff cuts and other disruptions.¹¹ The same analysis found that average Cabinet-department OIG staffing was 19% lower in May 2026 than in December 2024.¹¹

A Violation the Judge Called Obvious

Senators of both parties objected to the missing notice: on January 28, 2025, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin asked Trump for the required notice and case-specific reasons.¹² Trump had been asked before: in May 2020, he provided Congress 30 days' notice of two inspector general removals; a bipartisan group of senators asked for his reasons, and none came, Reyes wrote.² In response, Congress strengthened the explanation requirement in 2022.²⁶

Reyes ruled on September 24, 2025, and recorded that Grassley and Durbin still had no answer.² She wrote: "President Trump violated the IGA. That much is obvious."²

She still denied reinstatement: inspectors general have no fixed terms or for-cause protection, Trump could remove them with the required notice and rationale, and back pay could compensate their injuries.² She described the notice failure as "a statutory violation, not a structural breach" in finding no irreparable harm.² She also found that firing inspectors general without notice or explanation encroached on their independence and risked chilling investigations by appearing retaliatory.² The combined balance-of-hardships and public-interest factors favored injunctive relief, though only slightly.² She left the merits and constitutionality undecided, calling the constitutional question close.²

Trump Won the Power to Fire

On the power to fire, the courts gave Trump major victories.¹³¹⁴ On December 5, 2025, the D.C. Circuit upheld his removals of Harris and of National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, though neither was accused of conduct meeting the statutory grounds for firing.¹⁴ The labor board had lacked a quorum for most of the time since January 2025, its inspector general reported that December, and could not conduct business requiring one; it regained a quorum on January 7, 2026, when two Trump nominees took office.¹⁵¹⁶ On June 29, 2026, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court held the Federal Trade Commission's removal protection unconstitutional, overruled what remained of Humphrey's Executor, and ruled that Trump was entitled to remove Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.¹³

Slaughter did not decide the fate of officials outside that case; the Court declined to review Harris's case on June 30, and Wilcox's petition was pending as of October 10.¹³¹⁷¹⁸ The government now argues that Slaughter makes the inspector general notice rule unconstitutional; the inspectors general answer that notice and reasons do not restrict removal to specified causes.⁷¹⁹ As of October 10, 2026, that dispute remained unresolved, with a court conference scheduled for October 14.²⁰

The strongest defense is constitutional accountability: the elected President must be able to supervise and remove officials exercising executive power, or voters cannot hold him responsible for their decisions.¹³ Trump stated that goal in Executive Order 14215, "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies," signed February 18, 2025: accountability through presidential supervision of independent regulatory agencies.²¹ For the board and commission members, that defense won.¹³¹⁴ It settles who controls those offices, not what the public lost under the people Trump put in charge: investigations closed and warnings ended.³⁴

What Belongs in the Impeachment Record

The Constitution gives Congress impeachment power over high crimes and misdemeanors, and Hamilton described its subject as "the abuse or violation of some public trust."²²²³ The trust at issue here is stewardship of a government able to investigate its own failures.

The charge is abuse of that public trust: Trump removed the watchdog leaders, and his replacements curtailed public warnings and worker investigations, weakening scrutiny of his administration.²⁴³ Veterans and Congress lost the VA's public preliminary alerts; Saladino and Healy lost the investigations into their dismissals.⁴³ Congress can judge those losses when it judges the President's conduct. Winning the power to fire a watchdog does not justify what the President did with it.