Eight former inspectors general who were summarily fired by President Donald J. Trump last month filed a lawsuit on Wednesday asking a judge to declare their removals illegal and order the government to reinstate them.
“The purported firings violated unambiguous federal statutes — each enacted by bipartisan majorities in Congress and signed into law by the president — to protect inspectors general from precisely this sort of interference with the discharge of their critical, nonpartisan duties,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit asserts that the plaintiffs remain the lawful inspectors general of their agencies because Mr. Trump’s dismissals broke the law. It asks for an injunction requiring the executive branch to allow them to return to work and awarding them back pay.
Four days after Mr. Trump returned to office last month, the White House notified as many as 17 inspectors general in tersely worded emails that they were being terminated because of “changing priorities.”
Those were all in direct conflict with statutory restrictions on firing such officials in the Inspector General Act of 1978 and strengthened by lawmakers in the bipartisan Securing Inspectors General Act of 2022.
That statute says that before an inspector general is removed, the president must provide Congress with 30 days’ advance notice, including a written explanation with “the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
