The Friday Night Firing of More Than a Dozen Inspectors General in January 2025

The emails arrived on a Friday night, January 24, 2025, four days into President Trump's second term. They came from the White House personnel office, and they were short. One after another, inspectors general across the federal government, the independent auditors and investigators who watch for fraud and abuse inside their agencies, were told that they had been terminated, effective immediately. There was no thirty-day notice to Congress, which the law required. There was no case-specific explanation, which the law also required. Within hours, the count passed a dozen. By the weekend, news reports put it at about seventeen, covering departments from Defense and Veterans Affairs to Agriculture, Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the Small Business Administration. At least one of them, at the Agriculture Department, did not simply clear her desk. Told her service was over, she declined to treat the email as lawful, and she was escorted from the building.

In short: Federal law lets a president remove an inspector general but requires thirty days' notice to Congress and a substantive, case-specific reason. The January 2025 dismissals gave neither. Several of the fired watchdogs sued; none has been restored to office as of this writing. The episode shows what happens when a protection depends on the willingness of the protected-against to follow it.

The rule the White House skipped

To understand why that Friday night mattered, start with what Congress had written. The Inspector General Act of 1978 created independent offices of inspectors general inside federal agencies. In the larger departments, the president nominates inspectors general and the Senate confirms them. The law says they must be chosen without regard to politics, on the basis of integrity and professional skill.

The president can remove them. That has never been in dispute. But Congress attached conditions to the power. In 2008 it required the president to notify both houses at least thirty days before a removal takes effect, with the reasons. In 2022, after a wave of removals in 2020, Congress tightened the rule further. It required a substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons, and limited the practice of sidelining an inspector general on paid leave during the notice period.

The reasoning was simple. Notice gives Congress time to ask questions before a watchdog is gone. Reasons make it harder to fire an inspector general for doing the job too well. Neither stops a president who is determined to remove someone. Both make it visible.

The January 2025 emails did not provide the notice or the reasons. The administration's defenders offered a different argument: that the president has constitutional authority to remove officials in the executive branch and that the notice requirement could not lawfully restrict it.

Who was fired, and who was not

The fired inspectors general were not, by and large, political figures. Many had spent decades as auditors, prosecutors or investigators. Some had been confirmed by the Senate with support from both parties. A few had been nominated by President Trump himself in his first term.

Among them were Robert Storch, the Defense Department's inspector general; Michael Missal, who had overseen the Department of Veterans Affairs since 2016; Hannibal "Mike" Ware at the Small Business Administration, whose office had spent years untangling fraud in pandemic loan programs; Sean O'Donnell at the Environmental Protection Agency; and Phyllis Fong, who had led the Agriculture Department's office since 2002, longer than almost anyone in the government.

Not every inspector general was removed. Some offices at large departments were left in place. The selection did not follow an obvious pattern of party, tenure or agency, which made it harder to explain as anything other than a broad assertion of control.

For the staff inside those offices, the experience was disorienting. Auditors and investigators came to work on Monday to find that the person who had signed their reports, defended their budgets and stood between them and the agency's leadership was gone. Investigations did not stop, because career staff kept working and deputies stepped up. But everyone understood the message. The head of the office had been removed without the explanation the law demanded, and nobody could say whether the work in progress had anything to do with it.

Reactions from both sides of the aisle

The reaction from Congress did not split cleanly along party lines. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a Republican who had championed inspectors general and whistleblowers for decades and helped write the notice rules, said publicly that he wanted an explanation and noted that the thirty-day notice had not been given. Other Republicans were quieter, and some defended the president's authority.

Democrats were sharper. Members on oversight committees wrote to the White House demanding the legal basis for the firings and warned that removing watchdogs at the start of a term, as the administration moved quickly to cut agencies and staff, would remove the people best placed to spot waste and lawbreaking in that very process.

Some outside observers, including people who had served in Republican administrations, made the same point in practical terms. A president promising to cut waste, they argued, had just removed the officials whose job was to find it.

The precedents, fairly told

It would be easy to tell this story as if no president had ever done anything like it. That would not be accurate, and it would not help anyone understand what was different this time.

Ronald Reagan removed all of the sitting inspectors general when he took office in 1981. After objections from Congress, including from members of his own party, his administration reappointed several of them. Inspectors general were new then, and the episode helped establish the norm that they would generally carry over from one administration to the next.

In 2009, President Barack Obama removed Gerald Walpin, the inspector general for the agency that runs AmeriCorps. Obama gave Congress the thirty-day notice, but his initial explanation was thin, and Republicans and some Democrats criticized him. Walpin sued and lost.

In 2020, in his first term, Trump removed or replaced several inspectors general in a few weeks, including the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, who had forwarded the whistleblower complaint about Ukraine to Congress. Those removals led directly to the 2022 changes in the law.

So presidents of both parties have pushed against the system. What set January 2025 apart was the scale, the speed and the open disregard for the notice requirement Congress had written specifically to prevent removals from happening overnight.

The constitutional argument, taken seriously

The administration's position deserves a fair statement. The Constitution vests the executive power in the president. Under a theory known as the unitary executive, which has many supporters among conservative lawyers and some judges, the president must be able to remove officers who exercise executive power, and Congress cannot condition that power with delays or explanations. On this view, a thirty-day notice rule is not a harmless formality but an intrusion into the president's control of the executive branch.

That argument has gained ground in the courts. The Supreme Court has cut back on limits Congress placed on removing the heads of some independent agencies, and in 2025 it allowed the president to remove members of several multi-member boards while legal challenges proceeded.

Here is the answer, as I see it. Even on a broad view of presidential power, the inspector general law does not stop a president from removing anyone. It requires the president to say so in advance and to say why. Many legal scholars who support strong presidential authority still regard notice requirements as within Congress's power to set conditions on the offices it creates and funds. And the practical case is strong regardless of the constitutional outcome. Inspectors general answer to Congress as well as the agency because Congress pays for the programs they audit. Removing them without explanation leaves the people's representatives unable to find out how the people's money is spent.

What the fired watchdogs did next

Several of the fired inspectors general chose to fight in court. In February 2025, eight of them filed suit in federal court in Washington, arguing that the dismissals violated the Inspector General Act and asking to be recognized as still in office. The case moved slowly, as such cases do. As of this writing none of them has been restored to office.

Others spoke publicly, giving interviews and appearing at forums about what their offices had been working on and what the loss of independent oversight would mean. Their accounts were mostly measured and technical. They talked about audits in progress, investigations of fraud in programs serving veterans and farmers, and staff who were left without leadership.

The offices themselves did not disappear. Each kept its career auditors and investigators, and acting inspectors general stepped in. But acting officials lack the security of a confirmed inspector general, and they knew exactly what had happened to their predecessors. An office that is unsure whether its leader will survive the next critical report is not an office inclined to write one.

What goes missing when a watchdog is gone

The cost of firing inspectors general is hard to see, which is part of the problem. Nobody holds a press conference to announce an audit that was never started. A whistleblower who would have called an inspector general's hotline, trusting that the office was independent, may decide not to bother. A contractor who knew that someone was checking invoices may feel less watched.

Inspectors general also serve as institutional memory. Many have years of knowledge about which programs are vulnerable to fraud, which contractors have cut corners before and which reforms an agency promised but never made. When the head of an office is removed without warning, that knowledge does not vanish, but the person with the standing to push on it does.

And timing matters. The start of a new administration is when agencies are reorganized, budgets are redirected and new contracts are signed. That is exactly when independent auditing is most useful, because it catches problems before they become habits. The January 2025 firings came days before sweeping cuts and reorganizations across the federal government, and they left those changes with fewer independent eyes on them.

What a new Congress could change

Democrats won both chambers on November 3, 2026, and the new Congress takes office on January 3, 2027. Some responses to the firings are within its reach; others are not.

It can use its oversight power to ask agencies what happened to the work that fired inspectors general left unfinished, from open audits to pending investigations. It can hold hearings with former inspectors general and career staff. And it can use the appropriations process to fund inspector general offices directly and protect their staffing.

Strengthening the law is harder. Proposals over the years have included protecting inspectors general from removal except for specified causes, such as neglect of duty or misconduct, and giving them fixed terms. Those ideas run straight into the constitutional arguments about presidential removal power that the Supreme Court has been weighing in recent terms. Any new law would also need a president's signature or enough votes to override a veto. Readers should treat such proposals as long-term goals, not quick fixes.

The Senate's confirmation role is a more immediate lever. Inspectors general in the big departments need Senate approval, and senators of both parties can insist on nominees with real professional records and no partisan history. That standard is already in the law. Enforcing it is a matter of will.

Where progressives have made this harder

It is worth admitting that Democrats did not always treat the inspectors general system as urgent. The 2022 reforms passed only after years of proposals, and they were folded into a larger defense bill rather than debated as a priority on their own. Democratic administrations have sometimes found their own inspectors general irritating, and the Walpin firing showed that the instinct to remove an unwelcome watchdog is not limited to one party.

There is a messaging lesson too. Progressives often defend government programs in terms of what they provide. Inspectors general are the part of government that protects those programs from theft and waste. A party that wants voters to trust public programs should talk more about the people who keep them honest.

What you can do

• Ask your members what they will do. Use our representative lookup to reach your representative and senators by phone or contact form and to see their latest votes. Ask whether they will insist on the notice law and confirm qualified, nonpartisan inspectors general.
• Follow the cuts and firings. Our page on the government being gutted tracks the dismissals, reductions in force and court cases over the federal workforce.
• Watch the courts. The court watch page lists the Supreme Court's opinions this term with the Court's own summaries and its emergency docket, where many removal cases have landed.
• Keep up with the rule of law. Our coverage of democracy and the rule of law follows the fights over oversight, independence and accountability.

The emails of January 24, 2025, took a few minutes to send. Rebuilding an independent watchdog system, with leaders confirmed by the Senate and protected by rules that are followed, will take much longer. The new Congress, sworn in on January 3, 2027, is where that work can begin.