President Donald Trump has now fired 4 people who worked as an Inspector General in less than 7 weeks:
(1) Michael Atkinson, Intelligence Community Inspector General, fired on April 3rd: This appears to have been completely done in retaliation for Atkinson performing his duties, as they are required by law, when Atkinson alerted Congress to the existence of a whistleblower complaint.
(2) Glenn Fine, Acting Defense Department Inspector General, fired on April 10th: This meant that Fine would no longer chair the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee tasked with overseeing the $2 trillion in emergency coronavirus funding. This allowed Trump to fill this role with a political ally of his - Jason Abend, who was a policy adviser for Customs and Border Protection.
(3) Christi Grimm, Acting Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General, fired on May 2nd: This firing appears to have been done in retaliation, after Grimm signed off on a March OIG report that described a dire situation for frontline doctors and medical staff. This report found that the nation's hospitals were dealing with "severe" and "widespread" shortages of needed testing supplies and personal protective equipment, hampering their ability to test and respond to the coronavirus pandemic and protect medical staff. In other words, she was fired for doing her job and giving a professional opinion which ran counter to a Trump narrative.
(4) Steve Linick, State Department Inspector General, fired on May 15th: The reasons for Linick's firing are just now coming to light, but it doesn't appear to have been motivated by an investigation of Mike Pompeo's use of security detail as originally thought. During Trump's administration, Linick had issued two damning reports about the State Department - one report from August that found employees were subjected to "disrespectful" and "hostile" treatment and another report from November from within the department which found that Trump political appointees had improperly retaliated against a career civil servant. Linick will apparently be replaced by Stephen Akard, an ally of Vice President Mike Pence.
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It has become apparent that President Donald Trump's real problem is not with these individuals, but instead with the essential function of government oversight itself, which Trump would rather not have. These firings also demonstrate how Trump sees retaliation and cronyism, as acceptable forms of personnel management.