The guardrails are gone
In pursuit of unrestrained power, Trump has undercut and weakened federal entities created to prevent governmental abuses.
Though President Donald Trump’s decimation of major government agencies get all the headlines, his attacks on obscure but vital parts of the federal government are at least as consequential. The Office of Special Counsel, agency inspectors general, judge advocates general and the Merit Systems Protection Board might not be household names, but the backbone of our democratic system runs through them.
These federal entities were created to prevent governmental abuses such as the politicization of the civil service, waste, corruption and the misuse of presidential power. They are the internal watchdogs for government.
One by one, Trump has undercut and weakened each in pursuit of unrestrained power, with Congress largely remaining silent and the Supreme Court apparently ready to provide the president with unchecked authority over what were previously independent executive branch entities.
The weakening of these guardrails is the weakening of our democracy.
A prime example is the Office of Special Counsel, which protects civil servants from employment discrimination and retaliation, especially reprisals against whistleblowers who report wrongdoing. In addition, it enforces the Hatch Act, which places restrictions on partisan political activity by government workers and helps prevent the misuse of government resources.
In a highly abnormal move, Trump summarily fired then-Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger in February as he was investigating the administration’s mass firings of probationary employees. Dellinger sued and was briefly allowed back on the job by a federal judge, but an appeals court lifted the reinstatement order, and he ended his legal fight.
Since then, the office has been temporarily led first by Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins and now by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, hardly independent or impartial arbiters. Trump’s nominee, Paul Ingrassia, currently the White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security, withdrew Tuesday night after his alleged racist texts drew opposition from at least four Republican senators.
In recent weeks, critics have filed complaints with the Office of Special Counsel claiming that administration videos at airports and information on agency websites that blame Democrats for the government shutdown represent blatant violations of the Hatch Act. The fate of these complaints and many others is at best uncertain.
In the months since his inauguration in January, Trump has fired nearly 20 inspectors general, and there are now almost 40 vacancies out of 74 government IGs. Every year, the IGs identify tens of billions of dollars in governmental waste, fraud, and abuse. The purges and vacancies have weakened government accountability and independent oversight of agencies, fulfilling Trump’s apparent goal.
Early in the administration, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the judge advocates general, or JAGS, the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force who are supposed to be neutral arbiters of the law, advising commanders and therefore the administration on the legal validity of policies without partisan considerations.
Since the dismissals, Trump has sent National Guard troops to major cities under the guise of preventing crime or to help enforce the administration’s immigration crackdown, initiatives that are facing legal challenges and have raised serious questions about violations of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement without permission from Congress. The administration has also unilaterally launched military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea (and on Wednesday, in the Pacific) in a war on alleged drug couriers, killing the occupants and raising questions of whether the attacks violate international human rights and maritime law.
The Merit System Protection Board, established to protect federal employees from arbitrary personnel practices, has been inundated with complaints from thousands of federal employees claiming they were wrongfully fired, and until recently, has lacked a quorum to adjudicate the growing number of cases.
In February, Trump fired board chair Cathy Harris, a Democrat, and while Democratic member Raymond Limon’s term expired, leaving one Republican member on the three-member panel and no quorum to adjudicate cases that as of end of May included more than 11,000 appeals from civil servants claiming their employment rights were abridged.
Trump subsequently nominated and the Senate recently confirmed James Woodruff as a Republican board member, providing a quorum, but the board still faces a growing and daunting backlog.
In addition, the Department of Justice last month instructed MSPB administrative judges who handle initial employee appeals to consider constitutional arguments regarding the president’s power to fire certain federal workers, a stark departure from ordinary practice and an apparent effort to put his hand on one side of the scales of justice.
The undercutting of these watchdogs is just a part of Trump’s efforts to exert unfettered authority: politicizing the Justice Department and ordering retribution against his perceived enemies; executive actions seeking to penalize universities and law firms; legal and public attacks on the media; the unilateral dismantling of agencies created by Congress; the arbitrary firing of tens of thousands of federal employees; and so much more.
Individually, each of these actions might feel minor, lost in a sea of headlines. But their sum is wreckage—of the rule of law, of checks and balances, and of fundamental fairness. Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell wrote that “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” The dismantling of our democracy is already happening. The question now is whether we will understand in time to stop it.
Max Stier is the founding president and CEO of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, an organization focused on building a better government and a stronger democracy.
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With the full support of the six Christian Nationalists on the Supreme Court and GOP Congressional members the Felon is making the United States an authoritarian theocracy, with the Felon as leader and the American oligarchs running the Country (Putin's Russia).
There's no such thing as Presidential immunity in the Constitution. There's no such thing as the major questions doctrine in the Constitution. The Founders formulated the House of Representatives in order for the people to be represented in Federal Government. Gerrymandering is taxation without representation. Congress formulated the independent agencies in order to be a check on the Presidency. In its rulings, allowing the heads/members/chairs of such agencies to be fired without cause, the six Christian Nationalists on the Supreme Court are thwarting the will of Congress. For these reasons, in addition to the out and out corruption of Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Coney-Barrett should be impeached.
You don't need to tell Contrarians that "the sum is wreckage".
We know from the reporting by Norm of the lawsuits he and allies have filed to the reporting in the Contrarian by experts across the fields of law, government, health, national security, international affairs, etc. of the tsunami of unconstitutional acts.
We see. We grieve. We don't give up.