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Trump removes inspectors general, including Fong at USDA

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On Friday night, The White House removed the independent inspectors general of nearly every Cabinet-level agency including the Agriculture Department “in an unprecedented purge that could clear the way for President Donald Trump to install loyalists in the crucial role of identifying fraud, waste and abuse in the government,” The Washington Post reported. 

The inspectors general were notified late Friday by emails from White House personnel director Sergio Gor that “due to changing priorities” they had been terminated immediately, according to people familiar with the actions, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private messages, the Post said.

The White House has not released a list of the inspectors general who were fired, but the Post said Phyllis Fong, the Agriculture Department inspector general, was among them.



Fong has served in the role for 22 years and served under four presidents, two Republicans and two Democrats. She was initially appointed by President George W. Bush and took the oath of office in December 2022. 

The watchdogs at Homeland Security and Justice were the only Cabinet-level inspector generals spared, the Post added. 



“The dismissals appeared to violate federal law, which requires Congress to receive 30 days’ notice of any intent to fire a Senate-confirmed inspector general. The legal uncertainty could create awkward encounters on Monday, when several watchdogs who were told they were fired planned to show up in their offices to work anyway,” the Post continued.

The Inspector General Act of 1978, amended in 2022, also requires the president to provide “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for removal.

The firings are so broad it is impossible to determine if individual inspectors general had taken action that offended Trump.

The USDA Office of the Inspector General did publish two reports on Trump administration controversies.

In 2019, in response to a congressional request, the OIG initiated an inspection of USDA’s legal and budgetary authority to move the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture and jobs to Kansas City. The report questioned USDA’s budget authority to undertake the relocations, a position with which the Trump administration “respectfully disagrees,” the OIG wrote in the report. 

In 2020, the OIG analyzed the Trump administration’s trade mitigation packages that were created in response to China’s pull back in U.S. agricultural imports after Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese products.

The OIG concluded that Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue had the authority to use the Commodity Credit Corporation to make the trade mitigation to farmers and ranchers. 

Also in 2020, the OIG also published an analysis of the USDA funding streams in response to the coronavirus pandemic, but did not make any recommendations on the programs. 

The USDA Inspector General’s reports going back years remained posted on the organization’s website late Sunday night, as did Fong’s biography and the office’s 2025 Annual Plan and its Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2025-2029.

Fong has testified annually before Agriculture appropriations subcommittees and has often noted the amounts of money her efforts have saved the government or brought to the government.

Democrats have occasionally criticized her for not being aggressive enough in investigating firms such as JBS, the large Brazilian meat firm that does business with USDA. 

Bill Marler, a Seattle-based food safety lawyer, asked in a blog post Saturday what Fong’s firing will mean for an OIG investigation of the Food Safety and Inspection Service’s handling of food safety noncompliance at a Boar’s Head plant. 

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