This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Scott Pelley examines the efforts to dismantle independent oversight in Washington. The Trump administration says it’s rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in government. But they’ve gotten rid of the people whose jobs were to do exactly that — including the inspectors general.
IGs, as they’re known, are independent overseers who look for fraud, misconduct, and inefficiencies within agencies. They save taxpayers billions of dollars each year, and within the first few days of the Trump administration, at least 17 of them were summarily fired.
Also let go have been the heads of watchdog agencies, whose work includes protecting federal employees from illegal retaliation and termination.
With all the firings in Washington, who’s left to stand guard when the watchdogs are gone?
Firing the whistleblowers
“What we’re having happen is the dismantling of all of the oversight and transparency — entities, processes, procedures that were developed over years to ensure that our government operates with efficiency and integrity,” said attorney and former CIA officer Andrew Bakaj.
Pelley spoke with Bakaj and former State Department attorney David Kligerman, who now provide legal help for the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid. The organization has represented such high-profile whistleblowers as the anonymous CIA analyst whose case prompted the first Trump impeachment.
“There’s a system that was designed over the last 200 years,” Kligerman said. “And that’s a system that has a number of places where people go to be protected, to make disclosures, to point out wrongdoing. That’s– those are the IGs, the special counsel, and it’s this court, this Merit System Protection Court. And one by one, they’re being taken off the board.”
“And when those are off the board, the system doesn’t work. And we’re not just talking about whistleblowers. We’re talking about the type of corruption that could happen in a patronage-type situation, where I want to hire my brother-in-law. I want to put political cronies in. I want do all these things that, over 250 years in the republic we’ve said, ‘No, this is not what it means to have a non-corrupt, responsible civil service.'”
Dismantling the civil service
The civil service is the non-partisan workforce of the United States. As constitutional law expert Jamal Greene explained, civil servants are hired for their expertise — not which candidate they support.
“Most of the executive branch is filled with people who are career civil servants, who have expertise for which they were hired, and don’t get hired or fired because they adopt or don’t adopt the political program of the president,” Greene said.
Pelley asked Greene how the courts are likely to view the Trump administration’s firing of independent watchdogs — along with thousands of civil servants across government.
“We’ve never had a situation where the president has tried to remove civil servants en masse,” Greene said.
“I tend to think that the court is going to look unfavorably upon tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people being subject to the president’s control. The civil service laws have been around since the 19th century. And they were derived during an era in which there was rampant corruption, there was political patronage, there was clientelism.”
There was also murder. In 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot by a political supporter angry that he didn’t get a job. After that, Congress ended the “spoils system” that had dominated federal hiring. In its place came the civil service, the civilian workforce where federal employees were hired based on merit, rather than political affiliation.
“There are millions of people who work in the executive branch,” Greene said. “These people have expertise. They have their jobs in order to fulfill the mission of the agencies that they work for. And if they’re subject to partisan political control, then they may very well just do the bidding of the president.”
“And the president’s job is not to just have people do his bidding. The president’s job is to execute the laws passed by Congress. And so, the argument would be, ‘Well, Congress is the one that creates these laws. Congress is the one that structures these agencies and gives them their mission. Congress should be able to protect the execution of that mission.'”
With the president’s attempt to fire tens of thousands of federal employees, Greene says he is “almost certainly violating federal laws.”
“Now, the administration may argue that, ‘If you work for the executive branch, then you are subject to my control and you should do whatever I want to do politically. And if you can’t, you should get out,'” Greene said. “That’s really never been the way that we’ve understood the power of Congress.”
Nowhere to turn
Ordinarily, many of the fired civil servants would be able to appeal their cases to some of the watchdog offices that protect the rights of workers. But most of those officials have been fired, too: the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the chairwoman of the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
President Trump has named Douglas Collins, the newly confirmed secretary of Veterans Affairs, as the interim head of the Office of Government Ethics and may also make him interim head of the Office of Special Counsel.
“We’re not talking about shrinking the size of the government,” Kilgerman told 60 Minutes. “We’re talking about taking the referees and those who are in charge of protecting the game, making sure that the rules are followed. They’re off the field.”
“When they’re off the field, they’re off the field,” Kilgerman continued. “And we don’t know what’s going to happen when that happens. And that’s why people should care.”
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.
