Inspectors General Firings Are a Presidential Power Grab
Newsweek
Inspectors General Firings Are a Presidential Power Grab | Opinion
Published Jan 29, 2025 at 12:06 PM EST
Thomas G. Moukawsher
When President Donald Trump fired at least 12 inspectors general without notifying Congress as required by law, it was only partly about the inspectors. In reality he was firing the first shot in the battle over the “unitary executive.”
Under Trump’s brand of the unitary executive theory, Congress can’t order the president to notify it before firing anyone in the executive branch. Therefore, Trump could ignore the Congressional mandate of notice before firing agency watch dogs against corruption and waste. Lawsuits challenging the firings could become a showdown about presidential power.
And that showdown could be pivotal. That’s because, under Trump’s version of the unitary executive theory, Congress has no power to mandate anything about the president’s treatment of federal executive branch employees who make up virtually all of the 2 million federal employees. A victory for this theory could invalidate more than a century of laws aimed at insulating federal workers from politics.
No one cheers for bureaucracy, but consider what prevailed in the “good old days” before the Pendleton Act of 1883. As the government grew, the so-called “spoils system” grew with it, famously sweeping hundreds from their federal jobs following Andrew Jackson’s overthrow of decades of one-party rule in 1828. But great concentrations of power bring with them great concentrations of corruption, and by the 1860s a growing chorus began calling for reform, galvanized ultimately in 1881 by the assassination of President James A. Garfield by a disappointed office seeker.
With the creation of a Civil Service Commission, getting a federal job began to depend upon merit rather than political loyalty. Every president since then has chafed against the system in one way or the other, but the Congress and the public have repeatedly deemed this a good thing. The American system is one of checks and balances. With the growth of the federal government in the 20th century, people have already long recognized that we have an “imperial presidency.” The question now is what checks we want to uncheck and what balances we are willing to unbalance.
Trump’s advisors know he will have to fight Supreme Court precedent to totally unshackle the presidency. That’s why the inspectors general make good test cases. Under a 2020 ruling about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Supreme Court held that single individuals wielding significant executive power must be unconditionally removable by the president.
Should the inspectors be viewed as a group or singly? Do they wield significant executive power or, under other precedent, are they among the “inferior officers” the civil service was created to protect? You can bet that Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanagh will think the inspectors should be viewed individually and wield significant executive power. But we also know some of them are willing to go further.
Writing separately in the 2020 decision, Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, called for the Court to overturn the original 1935 decision that upheld limits on presidents removing certain office holders the Court believed were engaged in “quasi-judicial” or “quasi legislative” functions. Such agencies include organizations like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Thomas would strip these agencies of their protections against political interference, and Trump would love that.
So, while Trump will aim to uphold his firing of the inspectors general, if their claims are brought to court, they will allow him to press for a total victory, granting him a lethal grip over the economy, over broadcast journalism, and, by controlling the Merit Systems Protection Board, free reign over all the workers in the executive branch.
That may sound delightful to a short-sighted Trump supporter. It’s all well and good to have an enormously powerful president when you like the president, but how about when you don’t like the president? What’s to stop a radical left president from using these enormous new powers to fire the whole Trump bureaucracy and replace it with socialists?
Stability is ultimately what’s at stake. And stability may once again be up to the Supreme Court. Thomas still needs a few converts to have his way with the next case, but who’s to say he won’t get them? And if he does, we’ll get ours—in a bad way.