Inspectors general have long touted their independence from partisan politics, maintaining a strict firewall between themselves and the White House appointees whose activities they are supposed to check.
But now, over a year into the new Trump administration, political figures and the White House have sought greater influence over government watchdogs than ever before, leading to concerns about the independence of the oversight community.
After firing inspectors general at 19 agencies in an unprecedented purge in the early days of his second term, President Donald Trump has spent the past year nominating several new inspectors general with partisan backgrounds. Investigators, auditors and others were lost in widespread staffing cuts. And political appointees have increasingly gained new powers over the apparatus that is designed to independently operate in order to root out waste, fraud and abuse.
This week, Veterans Affairs Inspector General Cheryl Mason, one of Trump’s picks with a partisan past, is set to win an uncontested vote for the lead position at the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, the umbrella organization that provides training, peer reviews and cross-agency oversight work for inspectors general. CIGIE was nearly defunded last year before the Office of Management and Budget agreed to continue funding it at the request of Congress.
Mason worked on Trump’s presidential transition team in 2024, and she initially served as a senior adviser to VA Secretary Douglas A. Collins before Trump nominated her to be the department’s IG last year.
To take the position, Mason must receive votes from enough inspectors general, who can also abstain from voting. If Mason succeeds, Postal Service Inspector General Tammy Hull will step down from her role as CIGIE chair. Hull no longer wants to be involved in the council after a months-long standoff with OMB, two people familiar with the organization’s plans told The Washington Post. The IGs hope that making Mason chair will improve the group’s standing with the administration. But going forward, CIGIE will need to seek quarterly approval for funding from political appointees for the foreseeable future.
“We welcome the change in leadership at CIGIE,” said an OMB spokesman who declined to provide his name for publication. “Hopefully, this signals the end of corrupt, partisan behavior from the IG community and a return to their traditional mission of rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse.”
Beyond funding fights, the administration has reined in IGs in a variety of ways over the past year.
Last month, amid concerns that the office of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem was trying to quash investigations it did not like, her office confirmed that it had sought a full list of ongoing probes by the department’s inspector general. The IG told lawmakers this month that Noem’s agency has withheld records in investigations.
And through nominations, the president has installed a group of loyalists whom experts have raised concerns about having less experience than previous investigators and influencing the traditionally nonpartisan part of government.
Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito was a Republican congressman and House colleague of now-Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whom he is investigating over allegations of misconduct. Thomas March Bell, the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general, told lawmakers during his nomination process that he would “examine, evaluate, audit, and investigate to support the initiatives” of the president and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an unusual show of conformity from an inspector general nominee. Bell previously worked in the agency during Trump’s first term and as an attorney for congressional Republicans.
Mark Greenblatt, the former Trump-appointed inspector general at the Interior Department whom the president fired last year, said it is highly unusual to see so many inspectors general with partisan ties and histories working for the agencies that they now are tasked with monitoring.
“That’s a major firewall that they’ve just blown through,” Greenblatt said.
Impact on oversight work
About 20 inspectors general positions that the president can make nominations for remain vacant, according to a Post review. At several offices where acting inspectors general are filling in, there is a concern that political appointees can have greater influence. During the federal hiring freeze, which lasted most of last year, for example, acting inspectors general had to ask the heads of the agencies they are tasked with monitoring for permission to hire for exempted positions, according to three people familiar with those discussions. Like others interviewed for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.
Inspectors general offices lost slightly more employees than the government on average in the staffing cuts. The workforce at IG offices declined by 16.6 percent compared with 12 percent for the rest of civil service from January 2025 to the beginning of this year, according to a Post analysis of Office of Personnel Management data. Some of the most experienced staffers accepted early-retirement offers, according to several people who remain.
Michael Missal, who was fired as VA inspector general in last year’s purge, pointed to the dismissal of U.S. Agency for International Development watchdog Paul Martin just after his office published a report that was critical of the dismantling of foreign aid programs. The two recently started a law firm focused on regulatory compliance.
“By firing nonpartisan inspectors general, including one just hours after publishing a report that identified the risks of significant waste caused by the administration, and replacing many of them with individuals who had prior relationships with the administration, independent oversight has been severely diminished,” Missal said.
Nearly two dozen inspectors general did not publish their semiannual reports by the legally required deadline at the end of last year, which was mostly attributed to the government shutdown and staffing cuts, according to several offices.
The Treasury Department’s inspector general terminated an audit of pandemic programs in December, in part citing “resource constraints that prevent us from continuing this work.”
At the same time, AmeriCorps’ inspector general said that “due to both the hiring freeze and budget limitations, only two auditors are on staff to execute our mandatory audits.”
In total, the staffing cuts, inspectors general purges and new impositions such as hiring limitations have felt stifling to those who remain, according to people in several offices. They added that they are fearful of more cuts if the administration is dissatisfied with their work or doesn’t perceive them as sufficiently loyal.
Office of Personnel Management spokeswoman McLaurine Pinover told The Post that, after the hiring freeze, the agency “created a Strategic Hiring Committee comprised entirely of IGs so that IGs do not have to get permission from their agency heads to hire.”
Still, in several offices, the remaining staff have shown closer connections with their agencies than has been the norm. At the Social Security Administration, acting inspector general Michelle Anderson meets regularly with Commissioner Frank Bisignano and has given him information about her work, according to two people familiar with the meetings. Anderson has wanted to maintain a good relationship with Bisignano, the people said.
The inspector general’s office has largely avoided digging into the work of the U.S. DOGE Service at the agency, but it recently told Congress it is investigating allegations that a DOGE member has improper access to sensitive Social Security data. Before that, it had told senators last year that it would not evaluate the agency’s decision to classify thousands of living immigrants as dead.
In December, the Social Security IG released an audit of the agency’s phone metrics, which found that the wait time for someone to talk to a representative had dropped to single-digit minutes. Agency leaders celebrated the report as a vindication of their claims that they had improved customer service. Bisignano later told staffers he had thought the inspector general had wasted taxpayer dollars even looking into the statistics, according to a recording of his remarks.
However, an unpublished draft of the report reviewed by The Post showed that the inspector general had planned to report another metric — called the “total wait time” — to measure the overall time it takes for callers to be connected with an SSA employee. According to that draft report, in 2025 total wait time averaged 46 minutes to over two hours. That information was deleted from the draft after the agency reviewed it before publication, according to the document’s revision history.
The agency and the inspector general’s office did not respond to The Post’s questions about the report or conversations between the commissioner and watchdog.
In another inspector general’s office, analysts saw an entire report wiped away. A 2021 report on “Support for Gender Equality” was removed from the website of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction last spring as DOGE led a government-wide effort to eliminate references to terms related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
The deletion stunned those on the team who had worked on the report, according to two people familiar with the matter, who said they were reminded of censorship they had studied in Afghanistan. A group of employees made and wore shirts to the Crystal City, Virginia, office that read “RIP” with a picture of the report, the people said.
Those who are critical of the past work of the oversight community say that previous inspectors general have been subject to political whims and could do more to root out waste, fraud and abuse. Dan Fisher, former deputy director of the Lessons Learned Program at the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, penned an opinion piece on the mass firing of inspectors general last year, writing that the oversight community had not deserved to be defended.
“The inspector general system was broken long before Trump supposedly tore it apart,” he wrote. “It is long past time for reform.”
On the other hand, inspectors general have received bipartisan support, especially from Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Susan Collins (Maine). The pair pushed back against the White House’s efforts to defund CIGIE last year.
Grassley has also challenged the firings of inspectors general. In January 2025, he and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) told the White House that the dismissals were not done with proper warning to members of Congress as required by law. The White House did not respond directly to the senators’ requests for warnings about firings but said that the president has authorities to fire inspectors general for any reason under the Constitution’s Article II.
Grassley complained again in October when Trump inexplicably fired the inspector general at the Export-Import Bank.
“Pres Trump takes an oath to uphold the constitution & the laws but he hasnt told Congress he was firing the Ex-Im Inspector General,” Grassley wrote on X. “The law says POTUS has to specifically inform Congress abt IG firings and unless the courts say otherwise thats still the law.”
Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.
The post Under Trump, the government’s watchdogs are losing their independence appeared first on Washington Post.
