Trump Fires 17 Inspectors General in Friday-Night Purge of Federal Watchdogs

A Two-Sentence Email at 8 P.M. on a Friday

Late on Friday evening, January 24, 2025 — four days after his second inauguration — President Trump caused identical two-sentence emails from the White House Presidential Personnel Office to be sent to seventeen of the federal government’s independent inspectors general. The emails attributed each firing to unspecified “changing priorities” and informed the recipients that their service was terminated effective immediately.

Inspectors general are the federal government’s internal watchdogs. They are statutorily independent of the agencies they oversee, audit federal spending for waste and fraud, investigate misconduct by political appointees, and report findings to both Congress and the public. The position was created in the post-Watergate Inspector General Act of 1978 specifically to constrain the kind of executive abuse Watergate had exposed. Forty-seven years later, on a single Friday night, Trump fired more inspectors general than any president in the law’s history.

The dismissals hit the inspectors general of the Departments of Defense, State, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, Transportation, Labor, Education, Agriculture, Commerce, the Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Small Business Administration and several smaller agencies. Among those fired were Robert Storch at Defense, Cardell Richardson Sr. at State, Michael Missal at Veterans Affairs, Christi Grimm at HHS, Phyllis Fong at Agriculture, Larry Turner at Labor, and Eric Soskin at Transportation. Mike Ware, the SBA’s IG, was also at the time the chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency — the body that coordinates the IG community across the federal government. The firings amounted to a decapitation of that community in a single message.

The two agencies whose inspectors general were conspicuously not fired: the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Those are the two departments Trump’s administration most needs to cooperate with, not investigate.

The Law He Broke

Congress wrote into the Inspector General Act, and reaffirmed in a 2022 amendment, two specific procedural requirements that constrain a president’s power to remove an IG: at least 30 days’ written notice to Congress, and a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for each removal. Both requirements exist precisely so that a president cannot do what Trump did on January 24 — mass-fire watchdogs by form letter on a Friday night with no explanation and no warning to the legislative branch that funded their offices.

Trump did not provide Congress with 30 days’ notice. He did not provide case-specific reasons. He provided a two-word phrase — “changing priorities” — replicated verbatim in seventeen identical emails. Asked about it the next day, Trump told reporters that the firings were “very common” and “a normal thing to do,” neither of which is true. Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a longtime defender of the IG community, publicly noted that the law required notice and called for the White House to provide it. The White House did not.

A Federal Judge Calls It Unlawful — and Lets It Stand

Eight of the fired IGs sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. On September 24, 2025, Judge Ana C. Reyes ruled that the administration had violated the Inspector General Act and that Trump’s firings were unlawful. She wrote that the violation of the 30-day notice requirement was “obvious.”

She then declined to reinstate the inspectors general. Reyes reasoned that the plaintiffs had not shown “irreparable harm” sufficient to justify equitable relief, because Trump could simply provide the 30-day notice now and lawfully re-fire them on day 31. The ruling lets a violation of federal law stand because remedying it would be too easily reversed.

The practical result: federal cabinet departments responsible for trillions of dollars of annual spending have spent the entirety of 2025 and 2026 either without permanent inspectors general or with acting officials more amenable to the White House. The political appointees who run those departments — the most ideologically loyal and inexperienced cabinet of the modern era — have not had to answer to nonpartisan auditors for the way they have spent, fired, leased, contracted, or deported.

The Whole Point Was Always the Whole Point

Trump’s first term provided the playbook. Between April and May 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, he fired or sidelined five inspectors general in six weeks — including the State Department IG who was investigating Mike Pompeo, the intelligence community IG who had transmitted the Ukraine whistleblower complaint that triggered the first impeachment, and the Defense Department IG who was overseeing more than $2 trillion in pandemic relief spending. Each firing drew bipartisan criticism. None was reversed.

The January 24 mass purge took that 2020 playbook and ran it on every cabinet agency at once, in the first week of a new term, before the watchdogs had a chance to do anything. It was followed within weeks by the firing of the USAID inspector general, the gutting of the Department of Government Efficiency’s actual oversight functions in favor of Elon Musk’s freelance demolitions, and a broader administrative purge of nonpolitical career officials across the executive branch. By the time the mass deportations, the unlawful tariffs, the East Wing demolition, and the Iran war began, the federal officials whose statutory job was to investigate any of it had already been removed.

That is what the Friday-night email actually did. The “changing priorities” the email cited were real. The new priority was the absence of oversight.