In a matter of weeks, President Trump has thrown into question the future of a decades-old bedrock of open government: Independent watchdogs working inside federal agencies to find wrongdoers and root out waste.
But his recent spate of inspector general firings, combined with public threats and not-so-subtle efforts to undercut the authority of many others in those jobs, are only the most serious actions of a president who came to office as a skeptic but is now seeking re-election as a full-throated opponent of such independent oversight.
Trump's accelerating antagonism is more than another sign of how emphatically he's abandoned his "drain the swamp" 2016 campaign mantra. It's also drawn unusual campaign season antagonism from several influential Republicans in Congress, who last week launched legislation that would make it tougher for Trump to dismiss inspectors general and restrict who he could name as a government watchdog.
Since Trump arrived at the White House, the leadership of 28 of the 73 inspectors general offices in the government (two out of every five) has changed at least once. And at least one such replacement has happened at 17 of the 32 agencies or departments (more than half) where the president has the authority to directly appoint the inspector general.
Eleven agencies — including the CIA, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services — are now operating with acting, not permanent IGs. These positions have been vacant for a combined total of more than 26 years.
The Department of Defense, which has a budget of more than $700 billion this year (about $2 billion per day), has not had a permanent inspector general since the seventh year of the Obama administration.
The problem with having a bunch of acting inspectors general instead of permanent ones was addressed in a recent report from the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan group that investigates misconduct and conflicts of interest by federal officials — acting as an outsider watchdog over the work of federal watchdogs. People named to these jobs only on an interim basis, the group concluded, are "put in the position where the thoroughness or aggressiveness of their work can weaken their chance of being appointed to the permanent slot."
What has thrust the usually behind-the-scenes world of inspectors general into the forefront was a remarkable rapid-fire series of actions in the past three months:
April 3: Trump told Congress he intended to fire Michael Atkinson as inspector general for the intelligence community. Atkinson got on the president's bad side for doing his job — passing up the chain of command the whistleblower complaint, which ended up spurring Trump's impeachment, about the president soliciting Ukraine's help in digging up dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who worked for a Ukrainian company when his father was vice president.
April 6: Trump lambasted Christi Grimm, acting inspector general in the Department of Health and Human Services, after her staff issued a report about a severe shortage of testing kits for the coronavirus, delays in getting test results and shortages of masks and other equipment at hospitals. On May 1, he moved to replace Grimm by announcing her successor.
April 7: Trump removed Glenn Fine, acting IG at the Pentagon, who had also been chosen by his fellow IGs just days earlier to oversee the work of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, an independent oversight panel created by Congress to ensure the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package enacted in March was not misspent.
May 15: Trump announces his intent to fire Steve Linick, inspector general for the State Department. Linick was investigating allegations of misbehavior by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among other things.
May 16: Trump fired the acting Transportation Department inspector general, Mitch Behm. He had been selected for the special economics stimulus oversight panel and also was investigating Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, the wife of Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.
June 11: Leaders of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee sent a letter to House and Senate leaders warning that administration officials were arguing that more than $1 trillion of the money was exempt from oversight.
It was less than two years ago, on the 40th anniversary of the original inspectors general law, that IGs were being celebrated and the benefits of their oversight were being quantified and praised.
Michael Horowitz, inspector general for the Department of Justice and the chairman of the IGs council, reported that in 2016, then the most recent year with complete data available, his colleagues saved taxpayers more than $45 billion, engineered more than 4,800 successful criminal prosecutions and drove more than 4,300 disciplinary actions.
Overall, he boasted, every dollar spent on the work of IGs saved $17. And that return on investment seems to be continuing, with more than $20 billion in potential savings identified by the watchdogs so far this year.
Despite this record of success, the Trump administration has also attempted to undercut the IGs by slashing many of their budgets — in a seemingly ad hoc way, and largely without success.
For the coming year, for example, he's proposed cutting the IG budgets at six of the 16 biggest agencies, including a 7 percent reduction (to $178 million) for the Department of Homeland Security watchdog. But he's proposed increasing spending on IGs at all the rest, including a 13 percent boost (to $90 million) at HHS.
Delays and GOP pushback
Congress shares some responsibility for the current weaknesses in the overnight system, however, by moving slowly to fill vacancies and fill the loopholes in the law Trump has exploited to hobble the inspector general system.
The president has picked people for half the 16 inspector general vacancies where the president makes the nomination — but those eight have been waiting an average of 14 weeks for confirmation by a GOP-majority Senate focused much more intently on filling open judgeships.
Only three IG nominees have been vetted by committee and need only a vote on the Senate floor.
Critics point out that five of them have no experience as inspectors general or in another government oversight role.
Faced with mounting pressure from good government advocates, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced legislation last week to strengthen protections for the inspectors general.
The longest-serving current Senate Republican has been known since the 1980s as a champion of vigorous government oversight, and he drafted the bill while holding up a pair of Trump nominees for senior national security jobs for two weeks — until the White House offered formal justifications for the Atkinson and Linick firings.
Grassley noted the IG law requires the president to provide Congress with advance notice of such dismissals along with a reasoning.
In introducing the legislation, Grassley tried to put a bipartisan spin on his cause by noting President Barack Obama violated the law by firing an inspector general without explanation.
He also found four other Republicans along with five Democrats to sign on to the bill from the start — a highly unusual show of bipartisanship in today's Senate, especially in an election year. The GOP cosponsors are Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Rob Portman of Ohio and James Lankford of Oklahoma.
Grassley said the measure would beef up the notification mandate by making presidents include a "substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons," for every IG firing
His bill attempts to address concerns that Trump has named unqualified people as temporary inspectors general by requiring acting IGs come from the senior ranks of the watchdog community. To ward off any chickens guarding hen houses, the bill would bar senior agency officials from even acting temporarily as inspectors general. Other language is designed to safeguard ongoing investigations during IG transitions.
"Congress designed inspectors general to shine a bright light on waste, fraud and abuse through the federal bureaucracy," he said on the Senate floor when introducing the bill. "So IGs are the original swamp drainers."
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.