Trump Fires USAID Inspector General After Critical Report on Food Aid

The Firing

On February 11, 2025, Trump fired USAID Inspector General Paul Martin via a two-sentence email from a White House personnel deputy. No reason was given. The timing was not subtle: Martin’s office had released a devastating report just one day earlier documenting the consequences of the administration’s effort to dismantle the agency.

The report found that $489 million worth of food aid was sitting at ports, in transit, and in warehouses “at risk of spoilage, unanticipated storage needs, and diversion.” Tens of thousands of metric tons of food were stranded — 29,000 metric tons in Houston, over 40,000 metric tons in Djibouti, and more than 10,000 metric tons in South Africa. The report also warned that with almost all of USAID’s 10,000 employees forced onto leave, the agency was “susceptible to inadvertently funding entities or salaries of individuals associated with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.”

Part of an Inspector General Purge

Martin’s firing was the latest in a systematic campaign against independent government watchdogs. On January 24, Trump had fired at least 17 inspectors general across major federal agencies in a single late-night mass dismissal — the Department of Defense, State Department, HUD, Veterans Affairs, and more — notified by email and given no justification. The firings violated the Inspector General Act of 1978, which requires 30 days’ notice to Congress. Even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, a longtime champion of inspector general independence, demanded the administration provide legal justification.

At least five of the fired inspectors general had been investigating matters related to Elon Musk’s companies. Musk’s DOGE operatives had been the driving force behind USAID’s dismantlement, with Musk publicly announcing on February 2 that Trump agreed the agency should be “shut down.”

Food Rots While Watchdogs Get Fired

The sequence tells the story of this administration in miniature: Musk’s DOGE moves to gut an agency. The agency’s watchdog documents the damage — in this case, hundreds of millions of dollars in food aid rotting while people go hungry. The watchdog gets fired. The pattern is not oversight failure but oversight destruction: when the people whose job it is to catch waste and fraud find waste and fraud, they don’t get thanked — they get terminated.

A Senate investigation would later find that the fired inspectors general had collectively identified more savings to taxpayers than DOGE itself had claimed to achieve.