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By Scott Pelley, Aliza Chasan,
/ CBS News
Hampton Dellinger, the fired head of the Office of Special Counsel, warns that President Trump’s ouster of independent watchdog agencies and offices threatens government oversight.
Dellinger was head of the Office of Special Counsel, which handled federal employee complaints and government whistleblowers, until he was fired in February. In addition to Dellinger, Trump also removed the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the independent agency responsible for overseeing ethics rules and financial disclosures for the executive branch, and 17 inspectors general, auditors appointed to root out abuses of power, waste and mismanagement.
“I don’t think we have watchdog agencies anymore. The inspector generals are gone. The head of the Office of Government Ethics is gone. I’m gone,” Dellinger said. “The independent watchdogs who are working on behalf of the American taxpayers, on behalf of military veterans, they’ve been pushed out.”
After the Watergate scandal under President Nixon, Congress set up a system to audit the executive branch and ensure the rights of federal workers. Congress has guarded watchdog independence from politics so that no president can use these powerful auditors to punish enemies or hide their own fiascos.
President Trump told reporters on Air Force One in January that firing the watchdogs is “a very standard thing to do.” But, no president has fired the heads of the watchdog offices, en masse, in 44 years. In 1981, when the offices were brand new, then President Ronald Reagan fired all 15 watchdogs then serving because he wanted the “fullest confidence” in each inspector general. After congressional pushback, he rehired a third of them.
At the Office of Special Counsel — which has no relation to the Department of Justice office of the same name that prosecuted President Trump — federal employees across nearly all executive branch agencies could go to Dellinger to report problems if they feared reporting the issues to their supervisors would result in retaliation.
“And that was a decision not by me, but by Congress, that employees in the executive branch who are seeing something going wrong inside of an agency need a safe place to go that’s still in the executive branch but that is outside of the agency,” Dellinger said.
It works. A recent government report said whistleblowers helped the Office of the Special Counsel find $110 million that was owed to veterans and uncovered the overprescription of opioids at a VA clinic.
Dellinger, a Democrat, was appointed by former President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate, but he said his role was non partisan. He says he filed cases against the Biden administration “time, and time, and time again.”
The 17 inspectors general fired by Mr. Trump just four days into his term were auditors of top departments, including defense, veterans affairs, and labor. The inspector general of the foreign aid agency, U.S. Agency for International Development, Paul Martin was fired two weeks later.
Martin, who policed billions in foreign aid spending, issued a report saying emergency aid stopped moving during the chaos of the mass firings at USAID. His report warned that half a billion dollars in food aid might spoil or be stolen. Martin was fired the next day.
Martin had worked in various inspector general offices for more than two decades. He was an inspector general during Mr. Trump’s first term and stayed on at the government under Biden. Martin said the firings aren’t business as usual with a new president in the White House.
“He may bring his own team in, but there’s been an agreement between Congress and administrations over the last 45 years that inspector generals are different,” Martin said. “They’re chosen to be apolitical, nonpartisan oversight officials in each government agency. And that has been respected from administration to administration.”
Federal law requires a president to give Congress 30 days notice before removing an inspector general and provide a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the termination. Removing the head of the Office of Special Counsel also requires a reason for termination.
Dellinger, whose term was supposed to run into 2029, learned he’d been fired via email.
“And, of course, that email is just flatly inconsistent with the law, which says I can only be terminated for a very good reason. They didn’t have a very good reason. They had no reason,” he said.
So Dellinger sued to keep his job.
“I think every American respects the presidency. But I knew that this order, this directive, was unlawful. And ultimately we are a nation of laws,” he said.
The Trump administration had argued in court that it needed to “put an end to Dellinger’s rogue use of executive authority over the president’s objections.”
Last week, Dellinger gave up his legal fight after an order from an appeals court removed him. He said that taking his fight to the Supreme Court would take months or a year—and by then his whistleblower office would be devastated.
Cathy Harris is on the federal board that hears the appeals of fired federal employees — the very people the Trump administration has been laying off by the tens of thousands. If she left, their avenue of appeal could be blocked, at least temporarily. She was also fired by the Trump administration, though she was reinstated by a judge earlier this month and is back at work, though she was another court hearing scheduled for this week. Harris said she was not given a reason for her firing.
“I swore an oath to the Constitution when I took this job that I would fulfill my term through March 2028. And I believe very deeply in the civil service and in public service,” Harris said. “And I just couldn’t look myself in the mirror and walk away from this. I’m here to fight.”
To David Kligerman, who represents whistleblowers for the nonprofit group Whistleblower Aid — which represented a client in the first Trump impeachment — the White House’s actions feel like an intentional dismantling of independent oversight. Kligerman calls firing Dellinger and inspectors general “removing the umpires.”
“If you can’t go to the special counsel or they effectively neuter it, then there’s nowhere for you to go,” Kligerman said. “This is a very, very big deal.”
Harris hears complaints from fired workers often after receiving them from the Office of Special Counsel, where Dellinger worked. In his final days on the job, Dellinger worked to restore the employment of workers who, he says, were illegally fired.
The firings lead to a loss of talent, experience, and integrity in the government, Dellinger said. Losses aside, he’s concerned that the mass firings aren’t being done in accordance with the law.
In February, Dellinger investigated the firing of more than 5,000 probationary employees at the Agriculture Department. He asked for a pause of the terminations on the grounds that the firings were unlawful and recommended that Harris’s board consider the case. The board temporarily reinstated the workers the following week. The Trump administration asked an appeals court to remove Dellinger from office the next day, and are fighting in court to remove Harris.
“But you’ve got to be able to be in this job and do what it takes to uphold the law and not be afraid,” Harris said. “Not be afraid you’re going to be fired at any moment if you make a decision that somebody doesn’t like.”
Dellinger says it’s important the Office of the Special Counsel and other oversight agencies and offices remain independent, but he fears they won’t.
“Going forward, you’re always going to have now a person in my position who’s going to be dependent on the president’s good graces,” Dellinger said. “That is not how Congress set up the position, that’s not how it’s been for the past 50 years. But that independence, that protection is gone.”
While the majority-Republican Congress has largely backed Mr. Trump’s agenda, Paul Martin, the fired inspector general, said it’s unclear why Congress is not speaking up for independent oversight.
“Congress created the inspector generals and relied on, for the past 45 years, their findings, and their audits, and investigations to conduct aggressive oversight of any administration’s programs,” Martin said. “Since the firing of the inspector generals, there has been a deafening silence in Congress as far as pushing back.”
He worries that independence lost, might never be regained.
“I’m afraid that we’ve moved on to an era in which every administration will come in and assume that they’re going to replace all the inspector generals with people of their choice, that the secretary of treasury or the attorney general will get to pick his or her inspector general,” Martin said. “And that will turn the independent IG system on its head.”
Scott Pelley, one of the most experienced and awarded journalists today, has been reporting stories for 60 Minutes since 2004. The 2024-25 season is his 21st on the broadcast. Scott has won half of all major awards earned by 60 Minutes during his tenure at the venerable CBS newsmagazine.
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