From what I can tell, the IGs do serve at the pleasure of the President. The only thing he didn’t do is notify the Congress. Is that true?
"The removal procedure for presidentially appointed IGs is found in Title 5, Section 403(b), which reads in part An Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit a personnel action otherwise authorized by law, other than transfer or removal."
So worst case, they’re legally fired a month from a few days ago and are owed back pay. This seems much ado about nothing.
Any normal president wouldn't conduct the removal without being able to provide the substantive rationale. Which is then evidence Congress has about how the president is conducting his duties. Like "is this rationale consistent with the stated goals of increased efficiency".
Trump doesn't even care enough to make something up.
Pretty much every president has done this…so it probably is fine.
He just has to notify. The law doesn’t give the Congress nor judges discretion over whether the reasons are good. Just detailed.
Which of course isn't likely to happen in this case...
No. But that's in the hands of the American people. A simple majority in the house to impeach and 67 votes in the Senate to convict. 34 seats are up for election in 2026 [1]. Dems only have 47 seats, and a 20-seat pick-up is almost impossible. But if Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida [2] swung, that could convince moderate Republicans to convict.
Of course, we'd then have the practical matter of getting him out of the White House...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elec...
Also, of note, every time he has run for president he received more votes than prior runs—even in 2020. There is literally only one person who has ever received more votes than Trump and that’s Biden in 2020 and frankly there will forever be an asterisk after that election due to the pandemic and Trump’s subsequent win in 2024.
If you want him out of office before his term ends, you will need to have 67 democrats as senators with probably at least a quarter of those senators being willing to lose their own elections for that vote. Bottom line, he is in for the next four.
I think impeachment is a long shot. We agree in that Trump’s popularity is what gives him power. If he lost it, one woudln’t need 67 Democratic Senators on Capitol Hill, the GOP would save itself. It’s just difficult to imagine what Trump could do to fuck up that badly.
Why Trump lost in 2020 and then won in 2024 is clear. Biden's election win was no fluke. The 2024 election was about going with the devil-that-you-know, hoping that kitchen table concerns could be alleviated, and still delivered no landslide (unless you're Stephen Miller).
Just wait until all these Trump voters have to swallow the totality of merely the last 2 weeks of changes (and recissions, in some cases), and they'll find that wanting a bull in a China shop has severe consequences. After 100 days, when actual results will be expected, all the fun Trump & Musk had as they had their way uprooting bureaucrats will be over. As recriminations flow, whether Trump can hold together the crew he started with will be a major question. Interesting times.
I am not sure what the first 100 days of his second term will bring and I will make no dire predictions (literally all of the dire predictions people made in 2016 were wrong). I have never voted for Trump, but I am not tribal enough to automatically assume that everything he does or is doing is bad either. Short of the last 9 months of his first presidency, his first time in office had zero negative impact on me.
Truthfully, my bet is this second term will likely be as equally uneventful…at least for me and my family.
It's a bit more than "detailed". And he didn't even try to meet any of the elements above. It's essentially a loyalty purge.
"Detailed and case-specific." The case-specific reason can be appointed by my predecessor on such and such date. The law doesn't place any limits on what those reasons can be.
It’s not. It’s a gutting of a norm. That’s an important difference. The law provides for independent agencies where the President can’t just fire them. It didn’t provide this cover to the IGs.
There's a problem with how the law is written though... It supposedly required Trump to notify Congress before he was even President, but its requirements also only apply to the President. Arguably the law was impossible to follow as written, and I gather that's not even the strongest constitutional problem with the law as written. What we have here is a failure of Congress, and Trump exploiting it.