President Trump on Friday night fired 17 inspectors general, the internal watchdogs who oversee federal agencies, capping a week of dramatic shake-ups in the federal bureaucracy focused on loyalty to the president, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
The sweeping decision did not affect Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter. But inspectors general at several major agencies have reportedly been fired.
The Washington Post reported the layoffs earlier. A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The firings threatened to upend the traditional independence of internal watchdogs, and Mr. Trump’s critics reacted with alarm.
“Inspectors general are accused of eliminating government waste, fraud, abuse and preventing misconduct,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”
People involved in Trump’s transition had signaled that such a shake-up was likely. And it’s consistent with an effort Mr. Trump began in early 2020, when he dismissed five inspectors general from their roles.
At the time, Mr. Trump was dealing with a coronavirus pandemic raging across the country, but he was also seeking to reshape the government to remove people he saw as trying to harm him. This included Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the US intelligence community, who handled the anonymous whistleblower complaint that led to the House’s first impeachment of Mr Trump.
Democrats have accused Mr. Trump of trying to gut independent offices.
Mr. Horowitz gave the Justice Department a report in late 2019 on the FBI’s investigation into potential ties between his campaign and the Russians that began in 2016, called Crossfire Hurricane.
Mr. Horowitz found that the FBI had a valid basis for opening the investigation, but he criticized the request for a warrant to secretly surveil a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. He also said that the FBI director at the time the investigation was opened, James B. Comey, violated department policy with secret memos about his interactions with Mr. Trump that later became public.
The Justice Department declined to prosecute Mr. Comey, a decision that infuriated Mr. Trump.
