Brian is executive director of the Project On Government Oversight, a nonpartisan group that investigates misconduct and conflicts of interest by federal officials.
Government oversight is under attack right now.
In just a few days last week, President Trump removed an inspector general for doing his job, stalled operations of the new Pandemic Response Accountability Committee and attacked an acting inspector general for releasing a report that he didn't like. These actions undermined all IGs across the federal government — the independent government watchdogs charged with investigating federal agencies and departments and holding their behavior accountable.
Trump's actions exposed just how vulnerable inspectors general are, making clear that greater independence is needed. Inspectors general currently serve at the pleasure of the president, and one perceived misstep can cost an IG their job, as we saw when Trump fired Michael Atkinson as inspector general for the intelligence community.
Now we're set to rely on inspectors general to oversee more than $2 trillion in emergency spending. That's an amount almost half the size of the entire annual federal budget, and the president will be able to remove any of them at-will if he doesn't like what he sees. Indeed, Trump made an apparent attempt to undermine the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee when he replaced the acting inspector general who had been named to lead it.
Independent oversight of the coronavirus economic rescue package will be crucial to making sure that taxpayer dollars go to those who need it most, not to the politically well-connected. In order to ensure oversight is conducted independently, Congress must pass a law protecting inspectors general from unwarranted removal by the president. And it needs to do so right now.
Inspectors general were created to make sure Congress has eyes and ears within executive agencies. Through audits, investigations and work with whistleblowers, these watchdogs are ensuring that you as a taxpayer are getting the greatest possible value from an executive branch that is supposed to serve you.
Failing to give all inspectors general protection against getting fired other than "for cause," like those enjoyed by the members of the Merit Systems Protection Board and the IG at the U.S. Postal Service, would be tantamount to Congress closing its eyes, throwing money at a problem — and just hoping for the best.
Congress last revamped the laws governing IGs a dozen years ago, most notably by giving them law enforcement powers. The House version of the bill, passed with strong bipartisan support, would have prevented any president from removing an IG for anything but good cause — such as violation of the law, neglect of duty and abuse of authority — but those protections were cut out in the Senate. Congress should now finish what the House started in 2008.
Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, who led that effort, introduced legislation last week that would give inspectors general for-cause removal protections and seven year-terms. Fellow Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut says he will push a companion bill in the Senate, and I sincerely hope this effort gains steam.
With hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars on the line, we cannot afford to leave our federal watchdogs unprotected. The stakes are too high to allow relief funds to end up in the pockets of the politically connected at the expense of families trying to make rent.
There's no real "success" to be found after a pandemic. This is undoubtedly a crisis that has shaken us to our core and will have effects for years or even decades to come. But Congress can and should mitigate loss where possible — including loss of money to waste or fraud that could have gone to hardworking families.
To do that, they need to bolster IG independence for this current crisis and beyond.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.