When Donald Trump fired the inspector general of the U.S. Department of the Interior last week, he fired his own political appointee and someone who has openly criticized the agency’s practices.
Throughout Joe Biden’s tenure in office, Mark Greenblatt and his office were vocal about cultural problems at the agency and stated concerns that the Interior wasn’t prepared to handle the disbursement of huge sums of money from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law without waste, adequate oversight or corruption.
Greenblatt was one of at least 17 agency inspectors general fired by Trump in a late-night purge last week. Trump did not follow the law requiring that the president notify Congress 30 days before firing IGs, which likely makes those firings vulnerable to legal challenge, according to a briefing document from the independent inspectors general council. Several more IG positions have been vacant for a year or more, most noticeably the Treasury Department, which has now gone without a Senate-confirmed leader for more than five years.