Eight inspectors general who were fired by President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Wednesday charging their terminations were unlawful and seeking their immediate reinstatement.
“In this action, the duly appointed Inspectors General of eight major U.S. agencies — the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, State, Agriculture, Education, and Labor, and the Small Business Administration — seek redress for their unlawful and unjustified purported termination by President Donald Trump and their respective agency heads,” their complaint, which was filed in Washington, D.C., federal court, said.
The eight were part of a group of over a dozen IGs who were notified they were being fired “due to changing priorities” in a two-sentence email from the Office of Presidential Personnel four days after Trump was sworn into office.
The suit says the firings are “contrary to the rule of law,” including protections for inspectors general that were strengthened by Congress in 2022. That law requires a 30-day notification window between the White House informing Congress of its intent to fire an inspector general and that inspector general being removed from on-duty status. The White House must also provide substantive reasons for why the inspector general is being removed.
“The purported firings violated unambiguous federal statutes — each enacted by bipartisan majorities in Congress and signed into law by the President — to protect Inspectors General from precisely this sort of interference with the discharge of their critical, non-partisan oversight duties,” their filing said.
The “attempted removal was contrary to law and therefore a nullity,” it says, seeking a court order allowing them to go back to work until the proper process is followed. The firings have already had “a massive chilling effect through the IG community,” the filing said. “IGs must be watchdogs, not lapdogs. The deleterious consequences of the Trump administration’s contrary approach are hard to overstate.”
One of the removed IGs, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, told MSNBC’s Ali Vitali, “We brought suit basically to stand up for independent and transparent government oversight.”
Ware, who’d been nominated to his post at the Small Business Administration by Trump during his first term, said “IGs are independent — we are nonpartisan, which means that we are the taxpayers’ advocates within each of the government agencies.” “We save taxpayers about $100 billion a year, and we help improve the programs and their agencies” by cracking down on fraud and abuse and making recommendations to make the government “more efficient.”
The Justice Department and White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Another inspector general was fired in the same manner Tuesday as the larger group of IGs. Paul Martin, the inspector general at the U.S. Agency for International Development, was sent his email one day after his office released a report detailing the negative impact of the Trump administration’s dramatic downsizing of the agency.
