When President Donald Trump fired 17 inspectors general at the end of his first week in office, he exercised executive power that the Constitution vests in him alone. His opponents squawked predictably, and legal challenges to the firings are inevitable, but the Trump administration no doubt welcomes those challenges. It should, because they are challenges the president is likely to win, and for the sake of our republic, it is essential that he does.
Inspectors general, like so many other well-intentioned but bad ideas, originated in the Carter administration. The idea sounded good enough: stop government mismanagement and waste by creating an inspector general in each of 12 major agencies, charged with ferreting out government fraud and abuse. The inspectors general would be appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate, and they would have the authority to operate independently from their agency heads while reporting legal violations directly to the attorney general.
The first problem, however, is that the inspectors general did not turn out to be very good at accomplishing their intended purpose. The so-called “watchdogs” of the federal government missed everything from the National Security Agency’s unlawful bulk domestic phone records collection program to Operation Fast and Furious’ illegal arms sales to Mexican cartels. Yet despite having too little to show for their efforts, the sounds-good idea of an inspector general proved irresistible, and over time, inspectors general proliferated throughout the federal government. In 2008, Congress even created a new agency just to coordinate the IGs (who numbered more than 70 by that time).
The second problem is that in 2022 Congress tried to enforce the “independence” of the inspectors general by making them independent from the president himself — and there, the Constitution draws the line. Congress purported to require the president to provide notice to Congress 30 days before firing an inspector general and to provide “the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the firing in the notice. President Trump did not do this, but that is because he did not have to.
Requiring notice and a rationale — which is essentially a requirement that the firing be for some cause — goes beyond Congress’s power under the Constitution, and so President Trump could not actually be required to do it.
Hellbound and Down 