Want ‘Due Cause’ for the Firing of Inspectors General?  How About This?

Democrats in Congress like Representatives Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Maxine Waters, D-Calif., are criticizing President Donald Trump’s firing of 17 inspectors general, including in the departments of State, Transportation, Labor, Interior, Energy, and Commerce, claiming that doing so “without due cause is antithetical to good government.”

There is a very strong argument to be made that those inspectors general failed to do their jobs during the past four years. Their failures provide Trump with all of the “due cause” he needs.

Just two examples suffice: their failure to investigate the misbehavior of their departments in attempting to interfere in the 2022 and 2024 federal elections and in using government resources to violate the First Amendment rights of American citizens and censor their opinions and social media accounts.

Hard to think of anything more “antithetical to good government” than such outrageous conduct. Plus, one would think that the president realizes that if partisans like Raskin and Waters are criticizing him, he must be doing the right thing.

The job of a federal inspector general is straightforward. Under applicable federal law, they are tasked with conducting investigations to root out “fraud and abuse” in the “programs and operations” of their agencies. That obviously includes investigating malfeasance and misbehavior by agency personnel that violates federal law, wastes taxpayer funds, misuses congressional appropriations, and goes beyond the narrowly defined statutory authority of the agency.

In 2021, Joe Biden issued an executive order directing all federal agencies–including every one of the agencies whose inspectors general were fired–to get involved in state election administration. The agencies had to implement “strategic” plans to use agency personnel and resources to persuade and “assist” members of the public who interacted with those agencies to register and vote in federal elections. That included providing access to “vote-by-mail ballot applications,” identification documents, and multilingual voting materials.

Biden even told the agencies to solicit third-party organizations to “provide voter registration services on agency premises,” virtually guaranteeing that liberal, left-wing allies who wanted to keep Biden and his party in office would have access to every member of the public interacting with the federal government in official settings. 

Think about that for a moment. What possible business is it of the Energy or Commerce or Transportation Departments to play a role–any role–in our elections? Zero. Zip. Zilch.  

Numerous secretaries of state complained about this interference in their administration of elections. Moreover, Biden had no constitutional or statutory authority to interfere in the election process. All of the federal employees who were participating in this not-so-subtle Democrat get-out-the-vote campaign using government resources and taxpayer funding were violating the Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies and employees from spending funds on activities that Congress has not authorized and for which Congress has not appropriated funding.

Congress never appropriated any funding for any federal agency in the executive branch to engage in voter registration and ballot activities, with only one exception: the Federal Voting Assistance Program office at the Pentagon that helps overseas military personnel and their families.

Yet not a single inspector general investigated any of these illegal activities and illegal spending of taxpayer funds at any of their agencies. Why not? 

Worse still, these same agencies refused to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests from outside groups who tried to get information on what the agencies were doing to comply with Biden’s executive order. Wouldn’t you think that an inspector general would have a problem with an agency stonewalling the public and acting outside of its charter? 

Trump revoked Biden’s executive order in one of his first acts as president, but that does not excuse the failure of these inspectors general to do anything about this abusive behavior.

If that’s not enough, there is this. When he issued an injunction against the Biden administration in 2023, federal Judge Terry Doughty described the actions of the administration as “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The injunction was issued against numerous federal agencies, again including those whose inspectors general are now home tending their gardens, prohibiting them from communicating or meeting with “social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of contents containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms.”

Doughty’s 155-page opinion had page after page after page detailing the extensive meetings, emails, and other communications between government officials badgering and threatening social-media executives to censor and close accounts of American citizens who were expressing opinions the government didn’t like or with which it disagreed.  Doughty concluded that the “substantial evidence” of the government’s extensive, widespread, coercive behavior “depicts an almost dystopian scenario” in which the “United States Government seems to have assume a role similar to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.” 

It is true that the Biden administration appealed this decision, and the Supreme Court ruled in its favor. But that decision in Murthy v Missouri was based on the court concluding that none of the plaintiffs had established standing to challenge the government’s censorship of dissenting views on COVID-19, the 2020 election, and other issues. 

That holding did not dispute the voluminous evidence produced in the lower courts of the actions taken by federal officials throughout the federal government, and in fact, the opinion went through and outlined the outrageous actions taken by different federal agencies. It is just that the plaintiffs had not shown a sufficient causal connection between what happened to them individually and this acknowledged government-wide suppression of speech to be able to sue the government.

Yet, once again, the inspectors general sat on their hands. Nothing to see … move along. 

 They did not investigate the abuse of agency authority detailed in the court decisions that led to federal employees engaging in wholesale violations of the First Amendment rights of the public. Apparently, they saw no problems in their agencies setting themselves up as “Ministries of Truth,” despite, once again, having no statutory authority to do so and certainly no appropriations from Congress to act as the “Guardians of Truth.”   

The plain truth is that these inspectors general failed to carry out their core responsibilities. They failed to go after the abusive behavior of the officials who staff their agencies. They failed to protect the taxpayers’ dime that funds these agencies and that by law can only be used for actions that are authorized by Congress. They failed to protect the constitutional rights of Americans.

Due cause? President Donald Trump had more than enough.

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