Late last week, Donald Trump fired as many as 17 inspectors general without cause. These government watchdogs are responsible for investigating internal wrongdoing, possible ethical lapses, mismanagement, alleged corruption and fraud, and for reasons the president has not yet explained, he showed them the door on the fifth day of his second term.
The so-called “midnight massacre” was controversial for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that Trump’s move appears to be at odds with federal law. The New York Times report explained, “The firings defied a law that requires presidents to give Congress 30 days’ advance notice before removing any inspector general, along with reasons for the firing. Just two years ago, Congress strengthened that provision by requiring the notice to include a ‘substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the removal.’”
Trump evidently didn’t care about the legal constraints.
The inspectors general, however, are not the only executive branch officials who have been targeted as part of the new White House’s personnel purge. Team Trump started this week, for example, by ousting a group of career prosecutors at the Justice Department — not because they’d done anything wrong, but because they worked on holding the president accountable for his alleged crimes.
The same day, at least 56 senior officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development (better known as USAID) were also placed on leave.
As the week progressed, the list of firings grew. The Washington Post reported on the president firing “Democratic members of two independent federal commissions,” which represented “an extraordinary break from decades of legal precedent.”
On Monday night, he dismissed two of the three Democrats on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burrows, formerly the chair, the White House confirmed Tuesday. He also fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, a Democrat, an NLRB spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. Trump also removed the EEOC’s general counsel, Karla Gilbride, who oversaw civil actions against employers on a range of issues, including discrimination claims from LGBTQ and pregnant workers. And he terminated Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB’s general counsel.
It might be tempting to think a new administration is going to make all kinds of personnel changes, so no one should be too surprised by widespread firings.
But in many of these instances, it’s not that simple. When Trump fired the inspectors general, he appeared to be skirting existing laws intended to protect the IGs. Similarly, the EEOC officials who were ousted still had time remaining in their terms, leading one of the ousted commissioners to say in a statement that the president’s move “violates the law.”
Similarly, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern described Trump’s NLRB firings as an “unlawful purge” and an “illegal action.” To be sure, each of the president’s recent personnel moves is multifaceted. The Republican apparently fired career prosecutors at the Justice Department as part of his revenge tour; he likely fired inspectors general to make it easier for officials to pursue his agenda without fear of safeguards; and it seems easy to believe that he fired EEOC and NLRB officials to, as the Washington Post’s report put it, exert greater partisan control over “boards that oversee swaths of U.S. workers, employers and labor unions.” There’s also a larger concern about whether the White House wants to do away with the very idea of independent commissions and boards, centralizing even more power and authority in the Oval Office. But I’m also struck by the through-line: There are legal constraints in place that are designed to prevent many of these firings. The question is why the president appears indifferent to these limits.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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