President Donald Trump fired the inspectors general from at least 17 federal agencies in his first week in office, citing changing priorities. Trump canned another inspector general, Paul Martin of the U.S. Agency for International Development, on Tuesday.
Some of the inspectors general did not respond well to Trump’s decision to exercise his lawful authority and engage in a house-cleaning greatly resembling that undertaken by President Ronald Reagan following his inauguration in 1981. Former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Phyllis Fong, for instance, refused to leave and had to be escorted out of her office by security agents.
Fong and seven other former inspectors general, five of whom were nominated by former Presidents Joe Biden or Barack Obama, are now suing to undo Trump’s house-cleaning and to snatch their jobs back.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and obtained by CNN, claims that Trump’s termination of the former inspectors general for the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor, State, and Veterans Affairs, and the Small Business Administration was “unlawful and unjustified.”
‘Trump probably acted lawfully, I think, because the notice requirement is probably unconstitutional.’
The complaint specifically alleges that Trump failed to notify both houses of Congress 30 days before the removal and to provide a substantive, case-specific rationale for the terminations — both requirements added to the Inspector General Act in 2022, apparently in response to Trump’s first-term IG firings.
In other words, Fong and her compatriots want to haunt the offices of their successors, “carry[ing] out their official duties,” until Trump fires them again.
While the plaintiffs and their Democratic champions believe the firings were unlawful and “therefore a nullity,” Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith recently noted the “removals are probably lawful.”
“Trump probably acted lawfully, I think, because the notice requirement is probably unconstitutional,” wrote Goldsmith.
“The Trump administration has a pretty strong argument that the notice provision is unconstitutional,” continued Goldsmith. “The Court has recognized the president’s ‘unrestricted removal power’ over executive branch officials, subject to only ‘two exceptions.’ The potentially relevant exception here comes from the shriveled and maybe-dead precedent of Morrison v. Olson (1988).”
Goldsmith suggested that should this issue make it to the Supreme Court, the high court “will not look kindly on Congress’ requirement of a ‘substantive rationale’ and notice for firing IGs.”
When asked last month about the terminations, President Donald Trump told reporters, “We’ll put people in there that will be very good.”
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