Inspectors General Demonstrate Proper Method For Responding To Little Orange Tyrants
Susan Collins is concerned.
That Man may have made Elon Musk, the skipping dipshit of outer space, head of the made-up Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but there are already people in government getting paid with tax dollars to rout out waste and fraud: seventy-three inspectors general, mandated by statute and confirmed by the Senate. And, in a Friday-night purge, That Man illegally tried to fire at least 15 (NBC says 18) of them via an email from Sergio Gor, the former Mar-a-Lago DJ/Matt Gaetz’s wedding officiant/Junior’s baggage-handler to Greenland who is also now the new head of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel.
Welp, if you’re the manager of a bank and you plan to rob the bank, firing the security guards is step one!
Gor’s fuck-off letters — reading “due to changing priorities, your position as inspector general ... is terminated, effective immediately” — went out to inspectors general at the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.
Not having it: Hannibal “Mike” Ware, Chairperson of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), who pointed out that this was illegal, and said how about you go fuck off yourself, clown, in a businessy kind of way.
[B]ased upon the 2022 amendments to the Inspector General Act of 1978, the President must notify Congress 30 days prior to removal of an IG and provide “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for such removal. 5 U.S.C. § 403(b), as amended by the section 5202(a) of the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022 (Title LII, Subtitle A, of P.L. 117-263, 136 Stat. 2395, 3222). The requirement to provide the substantive rationale, including detailed and case specific reasons, was added to better enable Congress to engage on and respond to a proposed removal of an Inspector General in order to protect the independence of Inspectors General.
But, dictators don’t follow laws! Will the inspectors general simply show up to work today like a bunch of George Costanzas? We shall see!
Not fired, Michael Horowitz at the Justice Department, an Obama appointee who found himself in That Man’s favor because he criticized James Comey, giving cover for firing Comey for being TOO MEAN to Hillary Clinton about her emails. “Michael Horowitz, we’re keeping, I thought his report on Comey was incredible, actually. Such an accurate, well-done report,” he wanked.
Also not fired: Joseph V. “Joey Cuffs” Cuffari Jr. Remember him? He’s the DHS inspector general holdover from the first Trump administration, whose baked-potato face stalled then refused to investigate the Secret Service over those deleted text messages from January 6, and deleted messages from DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and acting DHS Deputy Ken “Cooch” Cuccinelli.
Cuffari, a low-level incompetent who Trump elevated from the sticks of Tucson, had been under investigation since his confirmation in 2019 for stuff like spending $1.4 million in taxpayer funds on lawyers to investigate the dozens of staff members who complained about his misconduct; ignoring sexual harassment claims (10,000 employees out of a survey of 28,000 DHS employees reported experiencing it); and spending another of the government’s $1.1 million to settle a wrongful termination claim over his alleged attempts to influence investigations.
President Joe Biden sure had more than enough cause to fire him, and should have, so why didn’t he? We will surely never know. Though Biden did remove the IG of the Railroad Retirement Board, Martin Dickman, and he replaced the acting IG of the Department of Commerce, Roderick Anderson, with Jill Baisinger, after Anderson was accused of whistleblower retaliation and other misconduct, both times following the law to give Congress 30 days notice. So why not Joey Cuffs? It’s a mystery.
Inspector general purges are not totally unprecedented. Ronald Reagan fired 15 inspectors general, but then he hired five of them back under pressure from Congress. But when it comes to Trump whims, this Congress is as supplicant and yielding as a block of Dollar Tree tofu, though Susan Collins is concerned. “I don’t understand why one would fire individuals whose mission is to root out waste, fraud and abuse. So this leaves a gap in what I know is a priority for President Trump.” And then she stared off into the sea. Lindsey Graham conceded that this action was technically illegal. Which is also the only kind of illegal.
Meanwhile, Adam Schiff knows what’s up. Trump doesn’t want anybody who might bring attention to his grifty memecoins or whatever:
Could Congress do something about this? They could! Will they?
[Washington Post archive link / Times of Malta / Congressional Research Service / Government Executive]
But Dotard said "hereby!" You can't argue with that legal argument. Checkmate IGs.
Just a coincidence, right?
https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3lgouxq3vkc2h