The Veterans Affairs Department’s internal watchdog was set to relocate to a different Washington office space last year. That was until the inspector general decided she needed her own bathroom.
Cheryl Mason, who served as VA Secretary Doug Collins’ senior adviser before President Donald Trump fired the existing IG and tapped her to replace him, held up the move for months, citing the need for a personal lavatory in her office, three people familiar with the matter told NOTUS.
“She says that’s when people are at their most vulnerable moment,” and the lack of an en suite bathroom presented security concerns, an IG employee said. “They’re having to redesign the whole space.”
It’s the kind of potentially pricey request that government watchdogs typically investigate — and have in the past, like with former Housing Secretary Ben Carson’s office renovations in Trump’s first term.
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The once-independent system that Congress established after Watergate has radically transformed in Trump’s second term. Trump’s unprecedented firing of nearly 20 inspectors general has unraveled the firewalls government’s ombudsmen have operated under for decades. The new watchdogs are erasing the lines between agency leadership and their own watchdog offices, Office of Inspector General employees told NOTUS, openly suggesting they should work hand-in-glove with the Trump administration to advance its goals.
“All the adults have left the room,” one senior OIG official said. “All these new IGs are lining up behind political leadership as if they’re lapdogs.”
Trump has installed former political appointees from the same agencies they’re now overseeing, a co-author of Project 2025, and a Republican congressman into watchdog roles across the government. Those IGs have boosted the president and his appointees in ways that directly contravene the statutory independence of their offices, 11 current and former staffers told NOTUS.
Some offices are operating without a Senate-confirmed head, including the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency and USAID, all agencies where Trump fired former watchdogs early in his second term. There’s less oversight happening. Cabinet department OIGs issued 15% fewer audits and a quarter fewer investigative reports on average in the first half of this fiscal year compared to the same time period in every year from 2020 to 2024, according to the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. These offices are down in staffing by nearly 20% on average.
As staff head for the exits across watchdog offices, those left are often operating within a culture of fear.
They’re “scared to death to do anything, so for the most part they’re just sitting on their hands trying to lay low,” the senior OIG official said of acting career officials.
At the VA, Mason has boasted about her personal relationship to the secretary at virtually every meeting, four people familiar with her approach said. She heeded Collins’ requests on the timing and focus of some reports and repeatedly overruled career staff on final publications.
Mason denied requesting a bathroom in her new office, saying that all Senate-confirmed presidential appointees were required by law to have one. Through a spokesperson, she declined to say what law she was referring to and suggested NOTUS ask the General Services Administration. GSA was unable to point to any such law. There is a law that caps presidential appointees’ office renovation budgets to $5,000 — almost certainly too little to build a new bathroom.
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Mason has leveraged her close ties to department leadership to make demands of staff.
After VA Secretary Collins’ office told the IG that preliminary alerts issued publicly by the watchdog on particularly alarming concerns were distracting senior staff, Mason eliminated them altogether, according to two people familiar with the edict. In an interview with NOTUS, Mason confirmed the change, saying the alerts were burdensome and not impactful.
She delayed reports on the modernization of electronic health records — a decades-long issue at VA — and limited discussion of staffing shortages in the office’s releases, again citing demands from the department. Mason told NOTUS her office was waiting for a clearer outline on the department’s workforce goals before raising any concerns about staffing cuts. VA medical staff who raised concerns about staffing shortages were merely presenting their “perception,” Mason said, and including those thoughts amounted to “hearsay.”
In at least one case, Mason struck entire sections from reports before they went public, according to draft copies provided to NOTUS. Those sections were about how the VA’s loss of primary care physicians impacted the overall system and were not included in the final report. Employees said the issue was flagged to them by staff during their investigation and should have been included, though Mason told them it was not within the scope of the report.
Mason has prevented staff from conducting the long-standing tradition of briefing Capitol Hill on its forthcoming reports, according to two people familiar with the change, telling employees the change was at Collins’ request. Prior to Mason taking the role, the IG would give a week’s notice to Congress’ veterans committees and proactively offer a briefing on any report that wasn’t routine, a Senate aide said. Now, Mason confirmed to NOTUS, she only provides a brief to the committees as they are releasing a report and only if committee members ask for one.
“It’s been incredibly challenging to continue doing the work we’re doing,” an employee said, who added that Mason asked if staff could bring items of concern to department leadership without publicly writing about them in reports.
Senior staff within the IG’s office were stunned by Mason’s requests, employees said.
“She wanted to make sure the message of everything we did was part of every agreement, promise or whatever she had with the secretary,” one employee said. “If you believe in independent oversight, that’s not what we were doing.”
Mason said her office has maintained its independence, though she noted she works “for the president of the United States,” is a part of VA and will continue to “work with the department.”
She acknowledged that she has changed her office’s approach, including to address issues raised by VA’s leadership. When Collins brings concerns to her, she said, she passes them along to staff but she alone has final decision-making authority.
“It’s not about ‘gotcha’ with the department,” Mason said.
She commissioned a flag for herself, telling staff she was serving in the equivalent role of a four-star general and therefore required one. One OIG employee said the flag cost more than $1,000.
“There,” Mason said, as she showed it to NOTUS over a video call. “Take a look at that flag.”
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The 1978 Inspector General Act formally established the watchdog offices, and while it housed them within federal agencies and departments, required that they be “independent and objective.” Under the law, no agency official can prevent the IG from initiating an investigation, conducting its work or issuing a subpoena.
Employees across government said their offices are no longer operating within the parameters of that law.
Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito, a former Republican congressman from New York, fired the career staffer who headed investigations in his office almost immediately after taking office, according to two people familiar with the move, which has not been previously reported.
That person had been spearheading a probe into an alleged inappropriate relationship between then-Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer — a former Republican congresswoman who entered and exited the House with D’Esposito — and a staffer. Chavez-DeRemer has since stepped down from her post, and the report into her alleged misconduct has yet to come out.
D’Esposito’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
His messaging since his appointment has been unusually intertwined with that of the Trump administration. He has repeatedly praised Trump, reposts the official accounts of the White House, and wished Vice President JD Vance a “#HappyBirthday,” highlighting his leadership of the White House’s anti-fraud effort.
D’Esposito appeared alongside Trump at a campaign event in Nassau County, New York, last week.
“I have a clear message to everyone in New York state, Democrat, Republican, independent: You have no choice anymore but to vote Republican, vote Bruce Blakeman, vote every Republican you can find because the Democrats are destroying our state,” D’Esposito told the police academy audience. Blakeman is the Republican candidate running for governor of New York.
Larry Turner, D’Esposito’s predecessor who was fired by Trump, said his successor is “acting as an extension of a Cabinet member.” Turner served in four different IG offices and said he had never seen similar behavior.
“It’s a little dangerous because when you do that, what message does it say to your staff?” Turner said. “It makes them reluctant to write certain things.”
His former colleagues in the Labor Department’s IG office are trying to keep their heads down and do their jobs, he said, adding it’s now “a completely different environment.”
At the Education Department’s OIG, “nobody wants to speak up about anything,” a current employee told NOTUS. That’s despite what they said were staff concerns about the increasingly blurry relationship between the OIG and the agency.
The office’s deputy assistant inspector general for investigation services, Terry Harris, was moved from that investigative role to lead technology services — a change that stripped her of her law enforcement status, the Education OIG employee said.
“It’s got all the agents worried about doing anything that puts us on anyone’s radar,” they said.
The Education OIG declined to comment on the employee’s concerns.
The pressure to lay low is prevalent across the OIGs. A VA inspector general employee said anybody who gives feedback to Mason is labeled “a resister, and they are totally blackballed.”
“The president is restoring integrity and transparency to our federal government, which has long been neglected by previous administrations,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told NOTUS in a statement, calling Trump’s nominees “highly-qualified and accomplished individuals.”
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In a recent joint town hall with Housing and Urban Development staff and workers from its inspector general’s office, acting IG Brian Harrison, a career government employee whom Trump tapped to lead the agency on a temporary basis last August, said Congress envisioned agency watchdogs to serve as “the strong right arm of the secretary, not a distant entity far, far away.”
“The independence of the inspector general is intended to lessen friction, not increase friction,” Harrison said, according to a recording obtained by NOTUS. “Somehow, over the years, and I know it to be true that it’s occurred here at HUD, that friction became friction between the IG and friction between the secretary. We don’t do that at HUD OIG.”
Typically, watchdogs have gone to great lengths to avoid even the appearance of being political, officials said. Mike Missal, VA’s inspector general until Trump fired him last year, said comments like Harrison’s were antithetical to how he approached his role: “You never make friends in this job.”
“We’re not supposed to use the office to support one side or the other. We are the umpires calling balls and strikes,” Mark Greenblatt, a former inspector general at the Interior Department who was fired by Trump, said. “You’ve co-opted the umpire and made them part of your team.”
Some Trump-appointed watchdogs have openly touted their collaboration with the administration as part of Trump’s “war on fraud.” Finding fraud is a core part of the inspector general mission, but the senior OIG official suggested some watchdogs are shattering norms and engaging in “political theater.”
“The new IGs, especially, are just going to meetings, standing at podiums, and saying, ‘We got more people that the Biden administration didn’t care about,’” they said, adding the watchdogs share talking points with White House officials. “You’re clearly not independent if you’re just repeating the vice president’s quote.”
Even as the administration has boosted its involvement in the work of inspectors general, many IG offices have raised concerns about a lack of cooperation with their home departments.
Education’s previous acting IG René Rocque met with Education Secretary Linda McMahon last May to talk about “unreasonable denials and delays” as her office worked to review the massive staffing changes at the department last year. She was replaced shortly after that.
The final Education OIG report includes an entire section on the “scope limitation.” Another report issued this week included a similar caveat, saying the department wouldn’t give the OIG an org chart.
The Department of Homeland Security also delayed and denied requests for information from its watchdog over 20 times across six months last year, at times citing “management preference” for preventing the OIG from having access to the department, its watchdog said.
“Our results have not come easily,” a report from the DHS OIG last year says.
Those challenges are also being felt at the Government Accountability Office, which acts as Congress’ oversight research arm. Staff there are strategizing on how to obtain information from former agency employees or through informal channels, an employee said.
“We definitely did not start a couple jobs last year because they were not going to go anywhere,” the GAO employee said. NOTUS previously reported that some agencies will not comply with GAO inquiries if the probe originated with Democratic members of Congress.
“There are some conversations about how certain reports will be viewed by the administration,” the employee added. “There is just extra time on the tone, because of nervousness about it.”
Some oversight officials blamed lawmakers for failing to prevent Trump’s assault on oversight. So far, some Republicans in Congress have pushed to go in the opposite direction: A bill to abolish the centralized OIG Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency and move some of its responsibilities to the Office of Management and Budget has been making its way through the House with Republican support.
Current and former staff said they had never before heard the type of language they are now hearing from IGs, and it’s delivering a clear message to oversight staff.
“These firings — coupled with the self-censorship being practiced by many IG
offices — has reduced scrutiny of important issues like sole-source contracting and management abuses across the agencies,” said Paul Martin, a former inspector general at
USAID and NASA who was fired a day after his office released a report including warnings about the effects of dismantling USAID.
In some cases, employees are no longer publicizing issues that come up during their investigations.
“There is fear that writing something that is contrary to what the IG wants to put out there will lead to negative consequences,” another current senior official in an inspector general’s office said, adding that the administration has made clear what it wants from the watchdog offices. “Preventing that is exactly why the IGs were created.”
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