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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-removes-inspector-general-who-was-to-oversee-2-trillion-stimulus-spending/2020/04/07/2f0c6cb8-78ea-11ea-9bee-c5bf9d2e3288_story.html)
President Trump has removed the chairman of the federal panel Congress created to oversee his administration's management of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package — the latest action by the president to undermine the system of independent oversight of the executive established after Watergate.
In just the past four days, Trump has ousted two inspectors general and expressed displeasure with a third, a pattern that critics say is a direct assault on one of the pillars of good governance.
Glenn Fine, who had been the acting Pentagon inspector general, was informed Monday that he was being replaced at the Defense Department by Sean W. O'Donnell, currently the inspector general at the Environmental Protection Agency. O'Donnell will simultaneously be inspector general at the EPA and acting IG at the Pentagon until a permanent replacement is confirmed for the Defense Department.
Late last month, Fine was selected by the head of a council of inspectors general to lead the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, created by the March 27 law.
On Friday, the president notified Congress that he was removing Michael Atkinson as the inspector general of the intelligence community — a decision that Trump acknowledged was in response to Atkinson's having alerted lawmakers to the existence of a whistleblower complaint about the president's dealings with Ukraine. The matter ultimately led to Trump's impeachment in the House before his acquittal in the Senate.
Trump has also refused dozens of congressional subpoenas and asserted to the courts that they lack jurisdiction to oversee his responses to Congress.
“We wanted inspectors general because of an out-of-control president named Richard Nixon, and this president is trying to destroy them,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. “What's happened this week has been a total full-on assault on the IG system.”
Fine is a career official who has served Republican and Democratic presidents. He had been acting Pentagon inspector general for more than four years, and before that was inspector general at the Justice Department for 11 years. Fine and his staff were caught by surprise when informed of the decision Monday and were given no explanation for the move, according to federal officials.
Trump cast his decision to remove Fine as merely cleaning house of Obama-era holdover appointments, saying those officials could be biased.
“We have a lot of IGs in from the Obama era,” he said Tuesday. “And as you know, it's a presidential decision. And I left them, largely. I mean, changed some, but I left them. . . . But when we have, you know, reports of bias and when we have different things coming in. I don't know Fine. I don't think I ever met Fine.”
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Trump also has on his radar the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, whose office Monday released a survey of more than 300 hospitals across the country finding that the top complaint was a “severe” and “widespread” shortage of testing supplies and protective gear.
That finding contrasted with Trump's rosier assessment that the country had carried out more covid-19 testing than any other in the world — nearly 1.8 million tests to date. Trump seemed perturbed by reporters' questions asking him to square his remarks with the survey conducted by the HHS watchdog.
“So give me the name of the inspector general,” he said. “Could politics be entered into that?”
Christi A. Grimm, the agency's principal deputy inspector general since January, began working for the inspector general's office at HHS in 1999 and, like Fine, has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted disparagingly about Grimm, selectively highlighting her service during the Obama administration.
“Why didn't the I.G., who spent 8 years with the Obama Administration (Did she Report on the failed H1N1 Swine Flu debacle where 17,000 people died?), want to talk to the Admirals, Generals, V.P. & others in charge, before doing her report,” he tweeted. “Another Fake Dossier!”
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