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.
On Monday, Greenblatt’s colleague Phyllis Fong, the IG at the Agriculture Department, was kicked out of her office by security after she did try to return to work.
Greenblatt will not try to return to the office because he doesn’t want to cause a security incident, he told NOTUS while walking his dog at 11 a.m. on Wednesday morning.
He said he believes there are staff at the agency failing to fully meet their responsibilities of assessing conflicts of interest or tracking how money is spent. “We view ourselves as the taxpayers’ representatives inside the federal government. That’s the kind of thing where the taxpayers deserve to know,” he said.
And now he’s on the outside looking in, questioning whether the culture of independence at the IG’s offices across the government can withstand an unprecedented onslaught of dismissals.
“You need someone objective to come in there and say, ‘Are these programs working or not working?’” he said. “Now you have this massive pendulum switch to ‘Drill, baby, drill,’ and you need someone independent who can look at these programs without a dog in the fight. That’s really the key.”
No president has fired this many IGs at one time since Ronald Reagan, who later rehired many of those he fired. Trump did dismiss some IGs over the course of his first term, and Congress put the 30-day notice requirement in place in response to those firings. Trump did not meet that requirement.
“There’s just a massive leadership vacuum now,” Greenblatt said. “That culture of independence inside the OIG community, that is something that we, just as taxpayers, need to be conscious of. It is absolutely crucial that inspectors general and their staff are totally independent and willing to call balls and strikes.”
The IG’s office could lose more workers if any staff take Trump’s Monday offer to civil servants of the chance to resign and receive a form of severance pay. While Greenblatt isn’t urging people to resist, he does worry about a further drain on institutional knowledge and resources.
“I understand if folks want to look at their life situation and decide to make a change. I hope they don’t, in the sense that we need robust oversight now, and decades from now, we’ll still need good oversight. That will never change.”
While the IG offices themselves will not cease to function and the agency deputies will mostly become acting heads, the acting leaders are inherently limited in their ability to take “bold swings,” Greenblatt said. He praised his deputy effusively but said that no matter the skills, IGs just have more “je ne sais quoi” authority making reports to Congress about waste or abuse when they’ve been appointed by Congress.
“And when you have a permanent IG, you can rearrange divisions. You can say, ‘Okay, we’re going to allocate our budget in this way or that way for the long term,’’ he said.
One of the IG’s biggest projects over the last two years has been monitoring the massive influx of cash — billions of dollars between the IRA and infrastructure bill — for the cleanup of orphaned oil wells and abandoned mines. Greenblatt expects that will need to continue to be a major focus under the new administration.
“We are here to provide the facts and analyze the facts according to law, and you need that when you have these big-ticket, big-dollar, high-sensitivity programs,” he said. “What’s going to happen with those abandoned mine land programs? What’s going to happen with the oil and gas permitting programs that Trump wants to accelerate? We don’t have a dog in a fight about whether they’re accelerated or whether their lease is going out or no leases are going out. We have a dog in the fight as to whether they’re doing it correctly.”
—
Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.