The 'Friday Night Purge' of Inspectors General

Why it Matters and What Comes Next

The scandal already has a name: the “Friday Night Purge.” The episode in which the Trump administration fired at least 17 inspectors general from various executive agencies, in a curt email sent after work hours, caps the most bruising week for American constitutional rule in at least 100 years.

If that instills a sense of panic, it’s not a bad thing; one of the worrying aspects of the past week is the relative absence of outrage and pushback, certainly in Congress and in the American electorate as a whole.

And if it sounds as if I’m overreacting, you don’t have to take my word for it. Look to any of dozens of commentators on both sides of the aisle whom you have learned to trust in the last several years and who have spent the last three days breaking glass and sounding the alarm. These include the three great guests in this morning’s Talking Feds podcast – Susan Glasser, David Jolly, and Bill Kristol – and my many new colleagues at the Contrarian, where I’m a founding contributor.

But there are many more who are repeating the point. And among government alumni, who understand with some nuance what Trump is doing, the distress is particularly keen.

After one week, it seems evident that Trump 2.0 will be the constitutional battle of our lives. There’s a lot on our side—most importantly, and always where Trump is concerned, the truth. But if we needn’t be fatalistic, we can’t be cavalier.

Attached to this entry is a long interview that I did yesterday – I think the only one of its kind – with one of the fired inspectors general, Mark Greenblatt of the Department of the Interior. We cover a lot of ground, including his background and the specifics of his own summary dismissal. Greenblatt calls it a “massacre,” and when you hear the full account, I think that you’ll be inclined to agree. But the meat of our discussion is when Greenblatt, a 20-plus year veteran of government oversight whom Trump nominated to his position, lays out the body blow this mass dismissal means for IG independence, which is the lifeblood of the system.

Greenblatt’s capsule description of inspectors general is the taxpayers’ representative within federal agencies. It’s very apt to a point: since the passage of the Inspectors General Act, IG oversight has returned nearly $700 billion to the federal fisc. But in their capacities as honest brokers of agency misconduct, they do more than restore money.

Greenblatt himself oversaw the investigation into the conduct of the Park Service in the June 2020 episode involving the forceful clearing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park so Trump could march to a church on the property, Bible in hand (albeit upside down) for a photo op. Greenblatt concluded that the Park Police’s actions were largely justified. It’s an apt illustration of the point that the best inspectors general go where the facts lead them, and not, as Trump surely assumes, where their political affiliation points.

As noted in a letter that Hannibal Ware, leader of the organization of IGs, sent after the firings to the White House Director of Presidential Personnel, the wholesale firings were in rank violation of the Inspectors General Act of 1978. That act requires both a substantive rationale and 30 days' advance notice to Congress before an IG can be fired.

The administration didn’t even make a gesture in the direction of compliance. That’s consistent with Trump’s mindset of calculating not what the law requires but what he can get away with (and each time he succeeds, it makes the next inroad easier). The brass-knuckles calculation here is that, even if a court orders the administration to comply with the law, the sacked IGs don’t get much out of it: they can still be fired with 30 days' notice. Even more difficult for them, they would come back to their old desks after a minimum of several months of litigation and be strangers in a strange land.

Greenblatt has absorbed all these complications, and more. He has resolved to put his focus on minimizing damage to the institution of inspectors general rather than trying to gain personal reinstatement: “If I’m going to have a few breaths of air to argue one way or the other about something,” he tells me near the end of our 50-minute conversation, “I’m going to argue about the independence of IGs going forward.”

The question is whether anyone in Congress will be receptive to his arguments. Trump defended the firings by saying, “it’s a very common thing to do.” That, no surprise, is a lie. The normal practice is rarely to fire IGs. The Biden administration fired one inspector general after concluding he had created a hostile work environment, and they complied with the legal provisions of advance notice and a detailed explanation. The only near analog to Trump’s mass purge happened in the Reagan administration, which fired a number of inspectors general, but then re-hired half of them after a strong backlash from Congress.

Don’t expect that to happen here. Senator Grassley, who styles himself the patron saint of inspectors general, offered a weak call for more explanation. Otherwise, it’s been crickets, with Senators such as Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham echoing Trump’s assertion that the firings were justified because “they’re not my people.”

Of course, the claim that Trump is entitled to put in his own people is both very wrong and very Trumpian. The whole IG regime runs on an assumption of independence and integrity; that is the coin of the realm.

One of the most prominent former inspectors general, Glenn Fine, who held the position at both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense (and is a long-time friend), literally wrote the book on the topic, his 2024 Watchdogs: Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government.

Fine was the Inspector General of the Department of Justice in the George W. Bush years. On several occasions, he delivered testimony to Congress that took the FBI to task. I well remember his testifying shoulder to shoulder with FBI head Bob Mueller. Mueller, former Marine captain that he was, acknowledged the problems Fine had uncovered and assured Congress that the Bureau would correct them. And that reflects the prevailing and proper attitude of DOJ professionals. They are not necessarily happy when the IG comes knocking, but they accept the importance of the oversight, especially—or perhaps only—if the IG has developed a reputation for playing it straight.

Trump’s sacking of IGs who are “not my people” is a direct threat to that core value. It is fundamental that they are not supposed to be “his people.” Fine put the point to me in terms of the purge’s possible effect of deterring IGs from calling out agency misconduct going forward: “It may chill future IGs, who could be hesitant to criticize agency programs or aggressively investigate high-level agency officials because of a fear of removal.”

The Friday Night Purge needs to be understood in terms of other methodical efforts to remove oversight and accountability. The administration was caught by surprise when some Democrats including Norm Eisen applied to join Elon Musk’s trophy project, the Department of Government Efficiency. The candid response of a Trump spokesperson: “[w]e have no room in our administration for Democrats.” Likewise, the Trump White House has moved to oust the Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which is designed to be a bipartisan and independent watchdog agency established in the wake of government overreach concerns after 9/11.And while we’re cataloging Trump’s obsession with stonewalling accountability, let’s not forget that one of the charges in the Mar-A-Lago documents case was for attempting to delete surveillance footage of likely improper document moving; according to the now-dismissed indictment, co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira told an IT staffer that “the boss” wanted the footage deleted.

The purge also comes straight from the pages of Project 2025, which outlined concrete plans to replace IGs with quislings loyal to the new administration. So much for Trump’s public assurance during the campaign that he would not follow it.

Of course, there’s no need for a complex explanation or a secret authoritarian playbook to understand what Trump is trying to accomplish here under the cover of dark. You don’t cripple the government’s oversight function unless you’re planning actions that you don’t want to see the light of day.

By Friday night, there was a chorus of former government employees, myself included, trying to bring home just how scandalous and pernicious the purge was, and the dangerous ripple effects it could promote. It’s a scandal that cries out for congressional investigation. But don’t expect any serious action from Trump’s servants in Congress, the same group that nearly unanimously voted to confirm Pete Hegseth on Friday, overlooking skimpy qualifications and credible allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement, and alcohol use that would have derailed a nominee in a different presidency four times over.

Some Democrats have begun to take up the cause. They are waging an uphill battle against the lockstep of Republicans unconcerned about the evisceration of government oversight. People often ask what they can do to oppose the grim encroachments on democracy that we are seeing in real time. Insisting on the truth and keeping the heat up on this issue—in living rooms, workplaces, and malls—isn’t a bad place to start. And I’ll certainly be doing my best to do that going forward in this Substack, which has grown very quickly thanks to you.

Talk to you later.