USDA Inspector General Who Refused to Leave Escorted from Office by Security
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
> Last Friday, President Donald Trump purged several agencies of their inspectors general, demanding that at least 17 people in the role immediately turn in their work laptops and ID badges. One of those IGs, Phyllis Fong at the US Department of Agriculture, decided not to leave, believing the order to be illegal. According to a report from Reuters, she was escorted from the building today by security.
Never mind a long four years, it’s been a long two weeks. Unfortunately, the law is too slow dealing with things like this. And even if it was ruled illegal, who’s going to enforce it. The White House?
The court that ruled it such. She would not only be entitled to back pay, anything her replacement does wouldn’t have legal force. That means anything they do can be challenged by anyone who doesn’t like it.
We’re seeing the limits of Congressional checks on the executive. But we still have an independent judiciary. (If that collapses it will be a good time to be a billionaire in America.) The judiciary’s advantage is its patient; it can exact consequences after 2028 in a way the executive and even the Congress cannot.
Besides, even if they did have the power to enforce the law, I can't say I exactly trust the Supreme Court to even try reining in Trump (except in minor ways) based on their recent track record. But who knows.
Sure, if we get down to mechanics like that, the courts require someone else to enforce. But at that mechanistic level, so does the President. He isn’t personally escorting her out of the office.
Fair enough, I strongly hope a good number of folks within the government show a backbone and resist unlawful or abusive orders however they can. Unfortunately those same people can easily be fired and replaced with somebody appropriately loyal (as is already happening). So, unfortunately, I'm not terribly optimistic.
Popular backlash seems to be fairly effective so far at least, so there is some hope. (For example the federal funding freeze which ended almost immediately after a flurry of confusion and outrage. Allegedly ended, anyway - it's not exactly clear in reality.)
These firings don’t appear to be unlawful or abusive. They’re sloppy. But he has the power to fire them.
> The removal procedure for presidentially appointed IGs is found in Title 5, Section 403(b), which reads in part An Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit a personnel action otherwise authorized by law, other than transfer or removal.
So it's illegal because he didn't notify Congress in advance. That statute was enacted in 2022 specifically to prevent abuses of power such as this.
I can't see any judge agreeing with this. The notice requirement is separate from the removal. "If an Inspector General is remove from office..." the President has to do X 30 days in advance. It's a bit convoluted to argue that if the second part isn't done, the first part is invalid. The breach is in failure to notice. That can be cured by noticing.
This is boy who cried wolf crap. The firings are unprecedented but totally legal. The breach was in forgetting to tweet some Congressmen. If we go Defcon 1 over paperwork fuckups, there's nowhere left to go when he does something that's substantively illegal.
It's a power they basically never use, but they can technically arrest someone for not complying with a congressional order/subpoena.
But then if they did decide to arrest Trump or others for compliance that'd pit the Sargent at arms directly against the secret services.
This is the real danger of where we’re at right now. We are currently at a point where the President has a stacked Supreme Court that had already showed they’re willing to take his side almost no matter what. There is now effectively no check against the executive branch because of that. Papers are already running stories about how Congress is just letting him loose, with these Inspectors General firings as a prime example of how Congress has just thrown their hands up without even a fight.
And then the Democrats were accused of only taking about the threat to Democracy instead of the price of eggs.
From what I can tell, the IGs do serve at the pleasure of the President. The only thing he didn’t do is notify the Congress. Is that true?
He just has to notify. The law doesn’t give the Congress nor judges discretion over whether the reasons are good. Just detailed.
Which of course isn't likely to happen in this case...
No. But that's in the hands of the American people. A simple majority in the house to impeach and 67 votes in the Senate to convict. 34 seats are up for election in 2026 [1]. Dems only have 47 seats, and a 20-seat pick-up is almost impossible. But if Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida [2] swung, that could convince moderate Republicans to convict.
Of course, we'd then have the practical matter of getting him out of the White House...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elec...
Also, of note, every time he has run for president he received more votes than prior runs—even in 2020. There is literally only one person who has ever received more votes than Trump and that’s Biden in 2020 and frankly there will forever be an asterisk after that election due to the pandemic and Trump’s subsequent win in 2024.
If you want him out of office before his term ends, you will need to have 67 democrats as senators with probably at least a quarter of those senators being willing to lose their own elections for that vote. Bottom line, he is in for the next four.
I think impeachment is a long shot. We agree in that Trump’s popularity is what gives him power. If he lost it, one woudln’t need 67 Democratic Senators on Capitol Hill, the GOP would save itself. It’s just difficult to imagine what Trump could do to fuck up that badly.
Why Trump lost in 2020 and then won in 2024 is clear. Biden's election win was no fluke. The 2024 election was about going with the devil-that-you-know, hoping that kitchen table concerns could be alleviated, and still delivered no landslide (unless you're Stephen Miller).
Just wait until all these Trump voters have to swallow the totality of merely the last 2 weeks of changes (and recissions, in some cases), and they'll find that wanting a bull in a China shop has severe consequences. After 100 days, when actual results will be expected, all the fun Trump & Musk had as they had their way uprooting bureaucrats will be over. As recriminations flow, whether Trump can hold together the crew he started with will be a major question. Interesting times.
I am not sure what the first 100 days of his second term will bring and I will make no dire predictions (literally all of the dire predictions people made in 2016 were wrong). I have never voted for Trump, but I am not tribal enough to automatically assume that everything he does or is doing is bad either. Short of the last 9 months of his first presidency, his first time in office had zero negative impact on me.
Truthfully, my bet is this second term will likely be as equally uneventful…at least for me and my family.
It's a bit more than "detailed". And he didn't even try to meet any of the elements above. It's essentially a loyalty purge.
"Detailed and case-specific." The case-specific reason can be appointed by my predecessor on such and such date. The law doesn't place any limits on what those reasons can be.
It’s not. It’s a gutting of a norm. That’s an important difference. The law provides for independent agencies where the President can’t just fire them. It didn’t provide this cover to the IGs.
There's a problem with how the law is written though... It supposedly required Trump to notify Congress before he was even President, but its requirements also only apply to the President. Arguably the law was impossible to follow as written, and I gather that's not even the strongest constitutional problem with the law as written. What we have here is a failure of Congress, and Trump exploiting it.
"The removal procedure for presidentially appointed IGs is found in Title 5, Section 403(b), which reads in part An Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit a personnel action otherwise authorized by law, other than transfer or removal."
So worst case, they’re legally fired a month from a few days ago and are owed back pay. This seems much ado about nothing.
Any normal president wouldn't conduct the removal without being able to provide the substantive rationale. Which is then evidence Congress has about how the president is conducting his duties. Like "is this rationale consistent with the stated goals of increased efficiency".
Trump doesn't even care enough to make something up.
Pretty much every president has done this…so it probably is fine.
Why with this kind of setup, absolutely no-one to stop them, would they step aside in 1450 days if voters have their say?
Past 10 days have been an absolute railroad of undoing past 100 years.
Imagine 1000 days from now the chaos and nobody can change anything for any reason.
The word tyranny seems to fit and I wouldn't have used that with Bush/Cheney or even Reagan.