President Donald Trump has done nearly incalculable damage to the federal government and the guardrails meant to rein in corruption, but as two legal scholars revealed for The Hill this week, his “most consequential casualties” are a key group of employees that some may not have heard of.
Published Sunday morning, the piece from The Hill hailed from David Wippman, emeritus president of Hamilton College, and Glenn C. Altschuler, the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. In the piece, the pair echoed the common sentiment among other legal scholars that Trump, in his second term, is obliterating the ethical guardrails put in place around the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
“These reforms were passed by large bipartisan majorities and signed into law by presidents of both parties. The Inspector General Act placed independent watchdogs, intended to survive changes in administrations, inside every major federal agency to root out fraud, waste and abuse and report their findings to agency heads and Congress,” Wippman and Altschuler detailed. “The Ethics in Government Act created an office to oversee executive branch ethics programs and prevent financial conflicts of interest. The Civil Service Reform Act strengthened protections for federal government whistleblowers.”
They continued: “Fifty years after Watergate, President Trump has ignored, undercut or torn down almost every one of these guardrails. In the process, he has made conflicts of interest easier to conceal, whistleblowers less likely to come forward, and official misconduct harder to identify, let alone stop.”
There has been one group of federal employees particularly hard hit by Trump’s wrath this term, whom the pair argued are his “most consequential casualties”: inspectors general, whom former President Jimmy Carter once called “perhaps the most important tools in the fight against fraud.”
Inspectors general are tasked with auditing the work of various federal government agencies, looking out for potential instances of waste, fraud, abuse or any other sort of misconduct, including actions which might verge into criminality. Trump purged over a dozen of these employees early in his second term, despite this administration’s claim to be going hard after “waste, fraud and abuse.”
“When President Ronald Reagan fired 15 inspectors general in 1981, treating them like other political appointees, bipartisan backlash forced him and his successors to respect their role and their independence,” the pair explained. “But on the fifth day of his second term, Trump fired 17 of them in a late-night purge, including at the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, Interior, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs, without providing the advance notice or substantive justification to Congress required by law. A federal judge ruled the firings unlawful but declined to reinstate the individuals who had been fired. Since then, the administration has fired or forced out at least four more inspectors general, leaving more than 70 percent of Senate-confirmed inspector general positions vacant, and proposed cutting their collective budgets by 23 percent.”
They later concluded, “… it seems clear that the reformers of the 1970s did not anticipate a president so contemptuous of ethical norms, a Congress so obsequious, a Supreme Court so accommodating, or a public so inured to political corruption and presidential self-dealing. The question facing voters today is whether they understand the real lesson of Watergate: that preserving democracy requires clear ethics rules and institutions strong enough to enforce them, even when presidents will not.”