A case study in congressional impotence

The IG firings reveal more about Congress than about Trump.

Good morning! It’s Tuesday, January 28, 2025. President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress is 35 days away. The 2025 elections are 280 days away. The 2026 elections are 644 days away.

Last night, the Trump administration ordered a government-wide pause on federal grants and loans. “The funding freeze by the Republican administration could affect trillions of dollars and cause widespread disruption in health care research, education programs and other initiatives,” the Associated Press reports. “Even grants that have been awarded but not spent are supposed to be halted.”

I’ll have more on the move in tomorrow’s newsletter. But first, today, I want to look at another presidential action from last week — and how Republicans responded:

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley holding up a copy of the Constitution during a 2016 speech. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

A wave of emails went out last Friday night notifying at least 15 inspectors general (IGs) — independent watchdogs stationed at agencies across the U.S. government to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse — that President Donald Trump had dismissed them from their posts.

“It’s a very common thing to do,” Trump explained, speaking to reporters on Air Force One shortly after news of the firings emerged.

It isn’t common, actually — but it also isn’t unprecedented. The IG system was created in 1978, with a bipartisan law signed by Jimmy Carter. The intention was to ensure apolitical government oversight; it took all of three years for the roles to be politicized.

The very next president to take office, Ronald Reagan, fired all 16 Carter-appointed IGs on Inauguration Day 1981, so they could be replaced by members of his “team,” as Reagan’s press secretary put it at the time. Eight years later, George H.W. Bush tried to do the same thing, announcing a wholesale firing of the government’s IGs.

So far, sounds pretty similar to Trump, right?

Not entirely. Both Reagan and Bush ran into a wall of congressional opposition, thwarting them from fully carrying out their plans. After backlash from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Reagan would eventually reappoint five of the fired IGs. Members of Congress protested again under Bush; that time, all of the IGs ended up keeping their jobs, as the new president reversed the dismissals under pressure.

Fear of congressional rebuke has held back future presidents, until now, from firing IGs en masse upon taking office. (Bill Clinton reportedly considered such a move, but decided that the blowback wouldn’t be worth it.) On the handful of times that presidents have ousted IGs in the middle of their terms (including Barack Obama and first-term Trump, both targeting IGs who had investigated allies of theirs), they were generally met with bipartisan backlash.

That has not been the case this week.

The top Democrats on every House committee signed a joint letter accusing Trump of violating federal law: under the Inspector General Reform Act of 2008, presidents are required to give 30-day notice to Congress before dismissing an IG; under the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022, they must also include a “substantive rationale.” Trump did neither.

But congressional Republicans have largely applauded (or ignored) the firings. Asked on “Meet the Press” if he thought Trump broke the law, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) responded: “No, he didn’t. No, well, technically, yeah. But he has the authority to do it. So I’m not, you know, losing a whole lot of sleep that he wants to change the personnel out.”

One GOP lawmaker who might have been expected to condemn the move was Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). At 91, Grassley is the longest-serving sitting senator; he has made protecting those who call out government misconduct — like whistleblowers and inspectors general — a signature of his career. He co-authored the aforementioned 2008 and 2022 IG protection laws, and has a long record of criticizing presidents of both parties when they’ve dismissed IGs. In 2020, when Trump fired five inspectors general, Grassley blocked two of the president’s nominees until he was given a sufficient explanation.

Earlier this month, Grassley — along with his home-state colleague Joni Ernst (R-IA) — helped launch the Senate Inspector General Caucus. “Inspectors general play an essential role,” Grassley said at the time. They “must be empowered to continue looking out for taxpayers,” Ernst added.

Exactly a week later, the inspectors general at nearly every Cabinet-level agency were fired. The Senate Inspector General Caucus didn’t seem particularly bothered.

“Senator Ernst looks forward to learning more about this decision and working with the president to nominate replacements, so the important work of independent investigators to root out waste, fraud, and abuse can continue with full transparency,” an Ernst spokesperson told Law360.

“There may be good reason the IGs were fired,” Grassley said in a statement. “We need to know that if so. I’d like further explanation from President Trump. Regardless, the 30-day detailed notice of removal the law demands was not provided to Congress.”

Compare that polite reminder to Grassley’s letter after Joe Biden fired Martin Dickman, the top watchdog at the Railroad Retirement Board, in 2024. Unlike Trump, Biden fired just one IG (as opposed to 15) and complied with the law’s requirement to give a 30-day notice and an explanation (an independent panel had “uncovered credible evidence” that Dickman “repeatedly engaged in abusive treatment of employees”).

But, at the time, Grassley wasn’t satisfied, writing that the rationale Biden gave was too vague to meet the bar set by the 2022 law. “This is a matter of public and congressional accountability and ensuring the public’s confidence in the Inspector General community,” Grassley told Biden. “Simply put, the law must be followed.” Now, Trump isn’t giving any rationale at all, and Grassley responded with the senatorial equivalent of a shrug emoji.

There are specific dynamics going on here: as mentioned, Trump fired five IGs in his last term, so he has already laid the groundwork for a move like his en masse dismissal. He has also consolidated more control over the Republican Party since his last term. Zeroing in even further, he also has a certain amount of leverage over both Grassley and Ernst: per Politico, some Republicans are worried about the nonagenarian Grassley continuing to hold the Senate Judiciary chairmanship. A few Trump nastygrams on Truth Social would not be helpful to Grassley as he fights to maintain his committee gavel.

Ernst, meanwhile, has just been shown the risks of breaking with Trump: when she briefly considered voting against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, she was hit with a barrage of conservative criticism and threats of a 2026 primary challenges. It would be hard to believe she doesn’t have that experience in mind as she weighs her response to the IG firings.

But the stark change in the congressional response to government watchdogs being fired in 1981 versus 2025 — or even in 2020 versus 2025 — is also part of something broader: the decades-long deterioration of lawmakers’ willingness to hold presidents of their own party to account.

The IG system (enshrined in the Inspector General Act of 1978) was just one of a slew of good-government reforms that passed in the latter half of the 1970s, as Democrats and Republicans worked together to clean up from the stain of the Watergate scandal.

Many of these bipartisan reform laws have been floundering for years; some have outright collapsed under the Trump era:

• The system of public campaign financing set up by the Federal Election Campaign Amendments of 1974 has been dying since Obama spurned it in 2008. The law also set up the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as an oversight body evenly split between three Democrats and three Republicans. Instead of fostering bipartisanship, that structure has generally led to deadlock.

• Seeking to bolster government transparency, Congress acted to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1974 and 1976. For decades now, the FOIA system has been plagued by backlogs, delays, and excessive redactions.

• Another part of the Watergate scandal was Nixon’s use of the FBI and CIA to spy on political rivals; these abuses led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which set up a court to review domestic surveillance. But the court sides with the government 99% of the time, leading to accusations that it is a mere rubber-stamp signing off on excesses by presidents of both parties.

• The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 created the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) to enforce anti-corruption rules; Trump’s first administration routinely ignored the OGE’s advice.

• After the records disputes of the Nixon era, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 set a standard that all presidential documents are federal property. But Trump ignored that standard, arguing that the law was intended to do the opposite and absconding to Mar-a-Lago with protected documents; when prosecutors tried to charge him for it, the case was dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge.

• The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was enacted to depoliticize the civil service after Watergate. In this case, a loophole embedded in the law itself is being used by Trump to subvert its original intention: the statute says that federal jobs of a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character” are exempt from the law’s protections. Trump’s “Schedule F” order, signed last week, simply declares that tens of thousands of additional federal employees fit that description, thereby shedding them of their protections.

• And then there’s the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which prohibited presidents from unilaterally refusing to spend congressionally appropriated funds (a practice known as “impoundment,” which Nixon had used repeatedly). A government watchdog concluded in 2020 that Trump broke the law by withholding Ukraine aid; he was later impeached for doing so, but acquitted by the Senate. (Only one Republican crossed party lines in either chamber.) With that permission slip in mind, Trump moved just last night to impound some more.

Many of these laws have few inherent enforcement mechanisms; they only work when presidents feel congressional pressure to follow them — from both parties. Unfortunately, Watergate and the spirit of reform that followed it is probably the modern high watermark of members of Congress standing up to a president of their own party. Since then, when, say, a Democrat has abused FISA, or when a Republican has broken the Presidential Records Act, the baseline expectation is that only lawmakers of the opposition party will speak out.

As a group, the Watergate reforms — initially passed with bipartisan support — have fared particularly poorly under Trump; to the extent that Republicans like Grassley took issue with their demise in his first term, these lawmakers appear poised to be much more forgiving in his second, as the IG episode reflects.

Many longer-term trends are at work here. In her book “Insecure Majorities,” the political scientist Frances Lee points to the fact that we live in an era where control of Congress keeps flipping back and forth. With such fragile majorities, lawmakers have less of an incentive to work across party lines, since they are only ever a few years away from seizing control and getting a much better deal. With the stakes of each election raised, they also are de-incentivized to say or do anything that might hurt their party — including criticizing their party’s president.

Together, these two dynamics ensure that Congress gets less done (which has the effect of forking over power to the executive) and conducts less oversight (which also has the effect of forking over power to the executive). Lawmakers have stopped practicing “institutional patriotism,” as Lee writes. They no longer put their branch before their party.

Primary elections, of course, have also played a role: even as the biennial race to control Congress has grown more competitive, very few individual congressional contests are competitive thanks to gerrymandering and geographic sorting. When lawmakers are more scared by primary races than general elections, it increases the power of threats like the ones levied against Ernst in recent weeks.

Longtime Democratic congressional staffer John Lawrence has raised another intriguing hypothesis. In his book “The Class of ’74,” he argues that the lawmakers who were elected in the wake of Nixon’s scandals — those same “Watergate Babies” who pushed the above reforms — actually ended up planting the seeds of hyperpolarization, embracing reforms like TV coverage of Congress that did more to advance lockstep partisanship than transparency.

These trends are difficult — but not impossible — to overcome. During the 2020 campaign, many Democrats envisioned a new set of post-Trump reforms, mimicking the post-Watergate era. (Then-candidate Biden, for example, said he would be inclined to support a law requiring presidents to disclose to Congress communications regarding pardons given to family members. He signed no such law, and letter pardoned several of his family members.)

Almost none of the proposals became law; in some cases, the Biden White House actively opposed legislative reform efforts (once elected to the presidency, Democrats no longer had an incentive to constrain presidential power).

In the end, there were really only two examples of successful post-Trump reform bills. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 was tucked into an appropriations bill as a way to prevent another January 6th. And the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022 — sponsored by Chuck Grassley — was tucked into a defense bill as a way to prevent another IG firing spree.

Both bills identified problems that threatened both parties (it wasn’t exactly in anyone’s interest to set a standard that the incumbent White House could overturn an election, or baselessly fire government watchdogs). And both received bipartisan support.

The more flashy of the two — the post-January 6th reform — required a major national event, which inspired a bipartisan group of senators to hash out a solution. But the other was more obscure. What the IG bill required was simply an idiosyncratic senator who had been on a lonely, decades-long crusade. Imbued with decades of seniority, Grassley had enough heft to muscle through his pet priority, protecting inspectors general.

What happens when senators put aside their idiosyncrasies, their apolitical priorities, their loyalties to accountability and to their branch of government in favor of their loyalty to party? Responses that once turned into reform laws become failed reform efforts. And failed reform efforts become mere condemnations. And then, eventually, condemnations become shrugs.