By Colby Itkowitz, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Olivia George · The Washington Post (c) 2025
President Donald Trump is taking aim at federal offices that investigate government malfeasance and protect workers from retribution, summarily firing and replacing five top ethics officials this week in an apparent attempt to consolidate his power over the sprawling federal bureaucracy.
Among those fired in the past week: the head of the Office of Government Ethics, which polices high-ranking officials suspected of violating conflict-of-interest rules; the leader of the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistleblower reports from government workers – and protects those workers from retribution; the inspector general of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who just Monday released a report detailing the cost to taxpayers of Trump’s effort to dismantle the agency; the chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals to firings and other disciplinary actions against federal employees; and the chairwoman of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which protects federal employee unions from actions taken against them.
The firings were met with widespread condemnation from former officials and good-government advocates, who called them an ominous indication of how Trump intends to flout the normal guardrails – and, in some cases, federal law – that constrain public officials. Trump has pledged to root out government waste, fraud and abuse, but advocates noted that he is systematically eliminating many of the internal mechanisms already tasked with doing that work.
“It’s creating a lawless environment in the federal government,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that advocates for a stronger federal government. “There’s no truth to the idea that what they’re trying to do is make the system work better.”
Adding to the concern is Trump’s decision to name Douglas A. Collins, the former U.S. congressman from Georgia recently confirmed to the Cabinet-level position atop the Department of Veterans Affairs, to lead the Office of Special Counsel and the Office of Government Ethics on an interim basis. Critics questioned Collins’s ability to run three critical agencies at once and denounced the installment of such an ardent Trump loyalist into positions that demand independence.
“Their plan is quite obviously to remove whoever they want if they disagree with them, even if it’s over political reasons, and make them sue,” said Kevin Owen, an attorney who works on worker protection laws. He said the firings mark an escalation in the Trump administration’s “assault” on the federal workforce.
Collins, already running a sprawling agency, will struggle to find the time to fulfill not one but two internal oversight roles, said Walter M. Shaub Jr., a former director of the Office of Government Ethics.
“That man is running a 400,000-employee federal agency. He’s not going to have time to spend all day the way the director of the Office of Government Ethics does, reviewing financial disclosure reports and ethics agreements,” he said.
Shaub held the top ethics job under President Barack Obama and for a few months of Trump’s first term before he resigned in July 2017. Before Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Shaub publicly criticized Trump for not fully divesting from his businesses.
Asked about all of the firings, a White House official said Trump is committed to building a team that advances his “America First” agenda. A Veterans Affairs spokesperson did not respond when asked how Collins would juggle the competing responsibilities of his three separate jobs.
Avik Roy, a former adviser to leading GOP policymakers and president of the right-leaning Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, said that those who staff the executive branch generally have an obligation to be responsive to a democratically elected president.
“It’s antidemocratic to believe that the government should function independently of what the voters want it to do when the executive branch has been given the statutory authority to act in that way,” Roy said.
Trump’s actions already face challenges, primarily around the question of whether he is defying federal law intended to protect government workers and, in some cases, agency heads from arbitrary or politically motivated dismissals.
Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel who was fired last Friday in a one-sentence email sent “on behalf” of Trump, sued the Trump administration on Monday, saying his termination was illegal because it violated a law that shields the leaders of independent agencies from removal by the president, “except in cases of neglect of duty, malfeasance or inefficiency.” A federal judge issued a temporary stay allowing him to keep his position in the interim as the case proceeds.
Cathy Harris also sued, on Tuesday, after Trump fired her the previous day from her perch atop Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals to firings and other disciplinary actions against federal employees.
The Office of Government Ethics announced Monday on its website that Trump had terminated its director, David Huitema. Like Dellinger, Huitema was confirmed by the Senate last year to a five-year term. Congressional Democrats had implored Huitema to open an investigation into possible conflicts of interest involving Musk due to his billions of dollars in government contracts.
Susan Tsui Grundmann, chairwoman of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which protects federal employee unions from actions taken against them, also received her notice of termination earlier this week.
The dismissals come on the heels of Trump’s mass firing of 18 inspectors general working within government agencies to identify waste and abuse. Inspectors general have fewer protections and can be removed by the president without cause, but Congress is supposed to receive at least 30 days’ notice of a termination. Several of those fired in the latest round have sued the administration and said they are confident of their legal recourse.
In recent weeks, Harris had grown concerned she would be terminated because other heads of independent agencies had been fired recently without cause, she told The Washington Post. “The rule of law will prevail and I’ll return to my position,” she said.
Some critics likened the current pace of firings to the atmosphere during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, who during the Watergate scandal in 1973 infamously ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, the lead investigator of the president’s role in the break-in. Cox had refused Nixon’s request to drop a subpoena of his White House tape recordings. But top Justice Department officials in turn refused to fire Cox, resigning instead, in an episode that became known as the Saturday Night Massacre and that contributed to the filing of impeachment charges against Nixon 10 days later.
Don Fox, a former general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics and a former acting director of the office who worked with both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, said the removals by Trump “would take us back to the Nixon days and an imperial presidency, and when the law and what it meant was whatever Nixon’s White House said it was. There really were no checks and balances.”
Appointees to independent boards and commissions cannot be fired without cause, making Trump’s firing of Harris and Grundmann illegal, critics said. A similar law is in place for terminating the special counsel, which is what Dellinger argued in his lawsuit that got him temporarily reinstated.
But there are no such protections for the director of the government ethics office. Inspectors general also can be removed by the president without cause, but Congress is supposed to receive at least 30 days notice of a termination, which Trump did not provide in those cases.
Dellinger’s firing is “particularly odious because he’s cutting off the champion of the whistleblowers,” said Norm Eisen, chairman of the State Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog group that has organized lawsuits against Trump.
Firing federal workers is a huge piece of Trump’s agenda to shrink the federal government. On Tuesday, the president signed an executive order telling agencies to prepare for “large-scale reductions.” Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who is leading the U.S. DOGE Service, also known as the Department of Government Efficiency, was by his side.
The implication for firing these watchdogs is a “catastrophic end” of accountability inside the executive branch, Shaub said. Purging the federal government, he said, is the first step to authoritarianism so there will be “no one left to say, ‘I won’t follow this illegal order,’ and no one left to point out that ‘this is illegal,’ and no one left to blow the whistle on the illegality.”
Shaub said his worries extend beyond what Trump is doing within the executive branch; he is also flouting laws passed by Congress and hinting at defying the courts.
“Once you lose all of these guardrails, it’s all over,” he said. “There is nothing similar to a republic left.”
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Lauren Kaori Gurley contributed to this report.