The Trump administration's attacks on oversight of executive power
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The Committee on Foreign Affairs will come to order. The purpose of this hearing is to assess the accountability mechanisms that ensure American taxpayer money is being spent as intended in Ukraine. The speaker here is Mike McCaul. He's a Republican from Texas, and in March of 2023, he was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Today we have the opportunity to question the independent inspectors, generals from the Department of State,

USAID, and the Department of Defense.

This hearing wasn't particularly memorable. It's just one example of the U.S. government in action. Congress conducts oversight on federal spending, like on aid to Ukraine. And so it called on the inspectors general of three different government departments or agencies. Your work is a critical component to ensure that Congress is being good stewards of the taxpayers' money. And it's necessary to prevent waste,

An inspector general is a nonpartisan watchdog inside the government. The role was created by a law, the Inspector General Act of 1978, which came out of post-Watergate efforts to put checks on executive power.

And under that law, inspectors general set up independent offices within their government agencies to investigate things like waste, fraud, and abuse.

Waste, fraud and abuse has become a catchphrase for this Trump administration as a rationale for making cuts to the federal government. But at the end of his first week in office on a Friday night, President Trump fired inspectors general at 17 different agencies. He was asked about it the next day during a press gaggle on Air Force One. Can you talk to us about the firing of the inspectors general? Why did you do that? And why is it a...

Trump told reporters he was keeping some inspectors general, including Michael Horowitz from the Department of Justice, whom he had singled out for his report that was critical of former FBI Director James Comey.

Now, to be clear, a president can fire an IG, but he's required by law to give Congress a reason in writing, along with 30 days notice. And that didn't happen here. Trump also added. I don't know that, but some people thought that some were unfair or some were not doing the job. It's a very standard thing to do, very much like the U.S. attorneys.

Nothing about President Trump's second term is standard or conforms to norms of government. Consider this. Firing these inspectors general is just one of many moves that the president has made that undermine government systems designed to check presidential power. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang.

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It's Consider This from NPR. The Trump administration continues to fire, shut down or defund independent elements of the federal government that traditionally work as a check on presidential power.

Supporters of President Trump say that's exactly the point. NPR justice correspondent Kerry Johnson and NPR political correspondent Susan Davis have been reporting on this effort and how it could change government. They join us now. Hey to both of you. Hi, Elsa.

Hey there. Okay, can you just start by explaining first the kinds of actions that you're talking about here? When you say that President Trump is weakening or eliminating parts of the federal government that would ordinarily be a check on the executive. Carrie, you first. Well, let's start with the Justice Department, my focus, where new leaders have basically swept the top ranks of the civil service.

They've fired prosecutors who worked on cases against Donald Trump and against people who stormed the Capitol. They've fired the top ethics officials, the pardon attorney, the person in charge of Freedom of Information Act requests. And they've tried to transfer some of the country's most experienced prosecutors who handle national security and tax issues.

into an office devoted to immigration. That's one of Trump's top priorities. They've also installed Ed Martin as U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He has no prosecutorial experience. He's been posting on social media that he's a lawyer for the president. And he's threatened to go after people who criticize billionaire Elon Musk. And one of the early actions that I would point to is when Trump decided that he was going to fire independent inspectors general across 18 different federal agencies.

And these were jobs that were created in response to the Watergate scandal under President Nixon. They were designed to create more accountability in the executive branch. But there's long been a view on the right that these jobs never should have been created in the first place. One of the people who agrees with that is John Yoo. He's a conservative legal scholar and a former Justice Department official. And one way to understand what Trump is trying to do, and I'm not saying even that Trump understands this is what he's doing, but the presidency, the way it's designed, urges him to do it.

is he's trying to snap those bounds that were imposed on the presidency in the post-Watergate era. So is the argument from some people on the right, essentially, there should be no independent checks on the president? Within the executive branch, yes. I mean, people like you would argue that these agencies should absolutely exist, but they should be more directly accountable to the White House.

And you can see Trump testing these boundaries by his administration's effort to shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, as well as the stop work orders, the firings or attempted firings at independent agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Election Commission. OK, that may be the theory of executive power of some people on the right, but but.

What about critics against the Trump administration's actions? Like, how are they characterizing what President Trump is doing here? From the perspective of some of these outside government watchdogs, Donald Trump is explicitly undermining the forces within the government that are aimed at stopping corruption.

I spoke with Danielle Bryan. She leads the Project on Government Oversight. I don't think it's inconsequential that removing the heads of those offices whose job it is to protect whistleblowers and prevent corruption and wrongdoing were the early targets of the Trump administration. I think what's also important is

The signal that that sends to all those who are left behind. Brian says no one's going to feel empowered now to raise their hand and report any wrongdoing or a conflict of interest. And the Trump administration is now fighting more than 100 lawsuits over some of these moves. So many it's needed to move lawyers around to defend the government in these cases. I also spoke with Tara Malloy. She's a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center, another election watchdog group.

And she noted the February 18th executive order calling for the president to have, quote, supervision and control of the entire executive branch. She called that point blank a power grab. Her focus was on the attempt to control the FEC, which oversees campaign finance laws. And look, she made this point that it can't both be a neutral arbiter of campaign laws and report directly to the president, one of the candidates on the ballot. And I think you can see the basic unfairness

If you were to flip the situation, if, for instance, the Biden administration had exerted presidential control over the FEC, would President Trump think that his 2024 campaign was getting a fair shake? Yeah, but I got to ask, you know, whatever your legal or constitutional theory of executive power is, politically speaking, pushing for extremely expansive executive power seems like a risky endeavor in this country. Americans fought a war so they didn't have to answer to a king. So

Is there much public support now for essentially a less accountable president? Look, there's a lot of political contradictions here. I would note that Trump campaigned very loudly on this idea that the president should exert more power over the government. And he won fair and square. So these actions shouldn't really come as a surprise to the country. But you're right. There isn't a ton of evidence that the country is clamoring to have this all-powerful executive.

And in the federal courts, they move pretty slowly, but they're really the only part of the system that's right now working as a check on the executive branch. They've been under pressure, too, from the president, who's been criticizing judges, and from Elon Musk, who's been calling for some of these judges to be impeached. The

The big question now is how long the courts can withstand that kind of pressure. Right. OK, so obviously many court battles ahead on this. But can we just presume for the sake of argument that Trump is successful in bringing some element of these functions directly under the control of the White House? How could that all play out, you think?

We're seeing some of it happen right now. Last year in the immunity decision about Donald Trump, the Supreme Court gave a president nearly absolute power over the Justice Department, including the ability to have conversations about criminal cases and other enforcement actions. And Trump seems to be taking full advantage of that power right now. It's really

been giving rise to a concern that allies of the president are getting a break from the Justice Department and that some of Trump's critics could be getting targeted by it. The DOJ and the FBI, of course, have a great deal of power to put people under enormous financial and psychological pressure. And if that power is being misused, it will have consequences for the rule of law.

Taken to its extreme, it would usher in an era of little or no independent checks on the president with fewer or no watchdogs and more politicized agencies. Now, proponents of this would say, look, accountability would still exist. It would exist in the court of public opinion. Presidents are still held accountable in elections by voters and also in the constitutional checks on power afforded Congress. Congress has the authority to pass laws to rein in the presidency.

or the ultimate power of impeachment to remove a president. But Elsa, as we're also living this in real time, public opinion doesn't matter as much in a second term. And Congress, particularly when controlled by the same party, demonstrates little interest in checking their president. So far, at least. That is NPR's Susan Davis and Keri Johnson. Thank you to both of you so much. You're welcome. Thank you.

This episode was produced by Brianna Scott. It was edited by Courtney Dorning, Patrick Jaron-Watananen, Kelsey Snell, and Nadia Lansi. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.

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