Letter doesn’t explain Trump’s IG dumpings
— President Donald Trump followed the law when he fired multiple inspectors general in the last two months, the White House has told Congress, but the administration offered no new details about why the internal watchdogs were let go.
A White House letter issued Tuesday in response to concerns from a prominent Republican senator does little to explain the decision-making behind Trump’s recent upheaval of the inspector general community.
It is unlikely to quell outrage from Democrats and good-government groups that fear the Republican president is moving to dismantle a post-Watergate network of watchdogs meant to root out corruption, fraud and other problems inside federal agencies.
“The White House took five pages to thumb its nose at Congress,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group.
The White House letter failed to explain why Trump fired the inspectors general, which “should put to rest any question whether the current law is adequate. It is not,” Brian said Wednesday.
She called on Congress to approve enhanced protections for inspectors general and impose “meaningful consequences” when the president fires an IG without cause.
“It’s time for Congress to stop writing letters (to the White House) and start drafting legislation,” Brian said. Without a strong rebuke from Congress, she added, Trump
“will continue to destroy these watchdogs with abandon.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — a longtime, self-appointed defender of inspectors general and congressional oversight — requested the White House explain the basis for the firings in April and May of the inspectors general for the intelligence community and the State Department.
The response Tuesday from White House counsel Pat Cipollone does not provide those details, instead making the points that Trump has the authority to remove inspectors general, that he appropriately alerted Congress and that he selected qualified officials as replacements.
“When the President loses confidence in an inspector general, he will exercise his constitutional right and duty to remove that officer — as did President Reagan when he removed inspectors general upon taking office and as did President Obama when he was in office,” Cipollone wrote.
The tumult has not been limited to the watchdog offices at the State Department and the intelligence community.
Trump also demoted Glenn Fine from his role as acting inspector general at the Pentagon, effectively removing him as head of a special board to oversee auditing of the coronavirus economic relief package. Fine resigned Tuesday.
And Trump moved to replace the chief watchdog at the Department of Health and Human Services, Christi Grimm, who testified Tuesday that her office was moving ahead with new reports and audits on the department’s response to the coronavirus despite Trump’s public criticism of her.
Taken together, the moves have raised alarms about efforts to weaken government oversight and about possible retaliation for investigations or actions seen as unfavorable to the administration.
Michael Atkinson, who was fired as intelligence community inspector general last month, advanced a whistleblower complaint that resulted in the president’s impeachment.
We, the people. But individual rights. The common good. But don’t tread on me. Form a more perfect union and promote the general welfare. But secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
From the moment the American republic was born right up until today, this has been its hallmark: Me and we — different flavors of freedom that compete but overlap — living together, but often at odds.
The history of the United States and the colonies that formed it has been a 413-year balancing act across an assortment of topics, priorities, pas- sions and ambitions. Now, in the coronavirus era, that tug of war — is it about indi- viduals, or the communi- ties to which they belong? — is showing itself in fresh, high-stakes ways.
On Friday, protesters massed at the foot of the Pennsylvania Capitol — most of them maskless — for the second time in a month to demand Gov. Tom Wolf “reopen” the state faster. It is one of many states where a vocal minority has criticized virus-related shutdowns for trampling individual rights.
“He who is brave is free,” read a sign carried by one protester. “Selfish and proud,” said another, referring to the governor’s statement that politicians advocating imme- diate reopening were “self- ish.” “My body my choice,” said a sign at a rally in Texas, coopting an abortion-rights slogan to oppose mask rules.
“The pandemic is present- ing this classic individual liberty-common good equa- tion. And the ethos of different parts of the country about this is very, very dif- ferent. And it’s pulling the country in all these differ- ent directions,” says Colin Woodard, author of “Amer- ican Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good.”
Though polls show a majority of Americans still support some level of shutdown, the cries to reopen have grown in the past few weeks as job losses mount. In Pennsylvania and across the country, the demonstrators’ chorus has generally been: Don’t tell me how to live my life when I need to get out of my house and preserve my livelihood.
“They’re being told to stay home, wait it out. And that’s a really weird democratic message to get. And the only way to do it is to say, ‘I trust the government,’” says Elspeth Wilson, an assistant profes- sor of government at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
While the catalyst is an unprecedented pandemic, the collision of individual rights and the common good is as old as the republic itself: Where does one American’s right to move around in pub- lic without a mask end, and another American’s right to not be infected with a potentially fatal virus begin?
“This is economic paralysis by analysis for some people. And they’re afraid,” says Steven Benko, an ethicist at Meredith College in North Carolina. “They feel devalued.”
Americans have long romanticized those who reject the system and take matters into their own hands — the outlaw, the cowboy, the rebel. Many American lead- ers have wrestled to recon- cile that with “common good” principles that are generally needed to govern.
“Reagan did that better than anyone. He was the cowboy selling the shared Amer- ican vision. That’s quite a contradiction,” Benko says.
Ronald Reagan’s crowning metaphor — the United States as the “city upon a hill” — was borrowed from the Puritans, whose traditions shaped the American ethos, including the compact that created the New World’s first English government. But Puritanism also asserted that hard work, a form of moral righteousness, heralded success and salvation.
Over time, and with other ingredients added as more groups came to American shores, a vague sense of shame became attached to the inability to be an individualist: If you couldn’t get along on your own, in the eyes of some, you were less of an American.
But is that kind of “rugged individualism,” as it came to be known, applicable in a 21st-century virus scenario where everything from food shopping to health care to package delivery requires a web of intricate, precise networks that form a common good?
Overlaid on this debate, too, is what some call an ignored truth: Individualism tends to favor groups in power, economically or socially. In short, doing what one wants is a lot easier when you have the means (health care, money, privilege) to deal with the impact it causes.
That’s particularly relevant when the direct impact of one’s individualism — in the form of virus-laden droplets — can ripple out to others.
“We fail to recognize how interdependent we really are,” says Lenette Azzi-Lessing, a professor of social work at Boston University who studies economic disparity.
“The pandemic and dealing with it successfully does require cooperation. It also requires shared sacrifice. And that’s a very bitter pill for many Americans to swallow,” she says. “The pandemic is revealing that our fates are intertwined, that the person in front of us in line on the grocery store, if he or she doesn’t have access to good health care, that that’s going to have an effect on our health.”
U.S. history has sometimes revealed that in times of upheaval — the Great Depression, World War II— common good becomes a dominant American gene for a time. Will that happen here? Or is the fragmentation of politics and economics and social media too powerful to allow that?
“The status quo is individualism. And then when we get to these crisis periods, it changes,” says Anthony DiMaggio, a political scientist at Lehigh University who is researching groups that advocate reopening. “All these rules go out the window and people are willing to jettison all these ways of looking at the world.”