The full scope of the Friday night mass firings was coming into sharper view as one fired watchdog official warned of “a never-ending cycle of politicization.”
The Trump administration on Monday ordered former staff members for as many as 17 fired inspectors general to immediately arrange for the return of work laptops, phones, parking decals and ID cards — even as questions remained over whether President Trump broke the law in dismissing independent watchdogs.
Some of the fired officials were seeking to raise alarms about what had happened. Among them was Mark Greenblatt, whom Mr. Trump had appointed as the inspector general of the Interior Department five years ago and who had led an interagency council of the watchdog officials until the new year.
“This raises an existential threat with respect to the primary independent oversight function in the federal government,” Mr. Greenblatt said in an interview. “We have preserved the independence of inspectors general by making them not swing with every change in political party.”
He warned that the credibility of the inspectors general would be at issue if Mr. Trump put in “lackeys that are rubber-stamping his programs and exonerating allegations for his own people willy-nilly.” Doing so would give the next Democratic president incentive to fire them all, too, setting off “a never-ending cycle of politicization.”
Aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Mr. Trump defended the purge. “Some people thought that some were unfair or some were not doing the job,” he said, falsely claiming that a mass removal of inspectors general was “a very standard thing to do.”
That is not true. While it is the case that after Congress enacted the Inspector General Act in 1978 and President Ronald Reagan removed all of those he inherited from President Jimmy Carter in 1981, he later rehired some of them. And since then, the norm has been that they remain in place when new presidents take office, underscoring their role as nonpartisan officials.