PROFILES OF THE PURGE: This Federal Watchdog’s Firing Exposes MAGA’s Fear of Oversight
Mark Greenblatt, fired Interior Department Inspector General, says Trump's termination of oversight officials is an alarm bell.
At his Senate confirmation hearing in 2019, Mark Greenblatt — President Donald Trump’s pick to serve as the Interior Department’s top watchdog — touted his long track record of “fair, objective, independent oversight.” He pledged to continue the investigations he inherited from his predecessor and resist any attempts at political interference in his work.
“I’ll have [the Department of Justice] on speed dial if I have to,” he told lawmakers.
As Interior’s Inspector General, Greenblatt kept his word. He pursued numerous investigations into both Republican and Democratic appointees during the Trump and Biden presidencies, respectively. Several of those probes ended with scathing reports documenting serious ethical misconduct by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and other high-ranking agency officials during the first Trump administration. Greenblatt also investigated Biden officials and found instances of ethical misconduct among them too.
That is the job of an Inspector General, or IG: to find and root out waste, fraud, abuse, and ethical failures within government agencies. But that work — the job Trump tasked him with — seemingly made him a target of his former boss. Days after being sworn back into office earlier this year, Trump fired Greenblatt and more than a dozen other inspectors general — an attack on government oversight and accountability that has come to be known as the “Friday night purge.” Several IGs have sued to push back on the firings.
In a lengthy interview with Public Domain, Greenblatt talked about his record as top watchdog of the Interior Department, a massive federal agency that manages hundreds of millions of acres of federal land. He also laid out his fears about where inspector general offices could be headed during Trump 2.0.
“What keeps me up at night is the politicization of the inspector general community. We are an oasis of apolitical, non-partisan oversight. We do fair, objective, independent oversight inside the federal agencies,” he said. “My concern is that if we get into a situation where, say, President Trump brings in political lackeys, folks who are not independent but are there to facilitate the president's policy agenda, then what's going to happen is, first of all, their credibility is going to be shot. But also what's going to happen is that when a Democratic administration comes in, they're going to fire all those IGs and then bring in their own lackeys, and then all of a sudden what we have is this wonderful construct of transparency and accountability comes crashing down.”
When Greenblatt was terminated from his job, he received no explanation. But Trump and his political allies have long seen IGs as an inconvenience and obstacle in their mission to shape the federal bureaucracy in their image.
Take Ryan Zinke, Trump’s first Interior chief and a current Montana Congressman. During his tenure at DOI, he faced a pile of IG probes, one of which found that Zinke misused his position of authority to advance a real estate deal in his hometown, among other findings. Zinke has repeatedly claimed — falsely — that the DOI IG cleared him of any wrongdoing.
“As a threshold issue, there is no exoneration in any way, shape or form under my tenure,” Greenblatt said of Zinke, noting that during his tenure the IG released reports documenting that he misused his office and lied to investigators. “I don't see how anyone can construe an exoneration there.”
Perhaps because Greenblatt didn’t back down when probing Zinke’s misconduct, the former Interior Secretary has railed IG investigations as “political hit jobs.” More recently, when Zinke campaigned for his current House seat in 2022, he vowed to introduce a bill called the FEAR Act to rid federal agencies of public servants. More than two years into his tenure, no such bill exists, although the Trump administration is now in the process of gutting federal agencies of staff.
David Bernhardt, who took over Trump’s Interior Department after Zinke resigned in early 2019, has also denounced the Inspector General community in recent years, claiming that their investigations are often “weaponized” against political appointees. Accusing IG investigators of “biases” and “flawed work”, he asserted in his 2023 book, You Report To Me, that IG investigations are “leveraged by partisans and activists to attack” the credibility, ethical compliance and decisions of political appointees.
Bernhardt’s book, however, fails to mention that he, like Zinke before him, oversaw an Interior Department beset by ethical misconduct. In one glaring example, Bernhardt’s close ally and personal friend, Douglas Domenech, an Assistant Interior Secretary during Trump’s first term, was found by Greenblatt to have violated federal ethics rules not once, but twice during his four years in office. Among other things, Domenech had repeated improper conversations with his former employer after taking office. Those violations were well-documented, and yet Bernhardt never seems to have pursued any disciplinary action against Domenech. Bernhardt, who did not respond to a request for comment, remains influential in Trump’s circle as a leader at the America First Policy Institute.
Greenblatt’s probes into these figures was never about partisanship or scoring political points. Greenblatt said he and the rest of the IG community are “very sensitive” to the idea that members of Congress or advocacy groups might try to use IG complaints to hamstring or drive out political opponents.
“That's not why we're here,” he said. “I'd like to think that the other IGs were similarly sensitive to that allegation of weaponization and handled the incoming complaints accordingly. There's a process, we looked at the nature of the allegations. Were they evidentiary in nature, or were they sort of speculative, and that was something we took very seriously.”
Greenblatt noted that while he uncovered ethical violations by Trump and Biden administration appointees alike, other probes cleared officials from both administrations of wrongdoing. For example, his office did not substantiate allegations that Bernhardt had violated lobbying disclosure laws, but did find that Tommy Beaudreau, the Interior deputy secretary under Biden, violated ethics rules by improperly holding stocks in oil companies.
While reports documenting violations get the most attention, Greenblatt said IG investigations can also serve to lift the veil of suspicion from those who are falsely accused of wrongdoing.
“If we're finding misconduct, then it wasn't weaponization. It was doing our job,” he said. “And on the flip side, many of these allegations are very public, on the Republican side and Democratic side, where nominations are held up on account of these allegations, or people are hamstrung because of the allegations, and IGs have real value when we exonerate people. And so the weaponization cuts the other way in the sense that we are just freeing up some people from the burden of these allegations by publicly stating we did not substantiate this. And this is true on both sides of the aisle.”
At the end of the day, Greenblatt challenges anyone to document partisanship or a political bias in his record. His non-partisan record, meanwhile, makes his firing all the more troubling.
“I would like to think that my work, my track record, was about fair, objective, independent oversight,” he said. “I would hope that the fact that I'm a straight shooter was not the reason that I was fired. That would be very disappointing to me.”
Looking to the future, Greenblatt fears we are witnessing a concerted political attack on the inspector general system as well as other oversight functions within government. “I think there is no question there is a large movement to reshape the way the federal government works and its interaction with accountability mechanisms both within the government … and outside the government,” he said. Right now, “we are seeing that in a much more fulsome and aggressive manner.”
As Trump brings in a new class of political appointees — many of them MAGA loyalists or industry insiders — IGs are “the very people who are ensuring that they’re playing by the rules and would hold them accountable if they are not,” Greenblatt said. “If you remove that mechanism, do we have a situation where folks have improper incentives and aren’t following the law? That’s very problematic.”
“We want the American public to have confidence that the folks in government are acting in an impartial manner,” Greenblatt added, “and having IGs there, having a cop on the beat, helps the American taxpayer feel more confident that nothing nefarious is going on.”
Whether Trump installs political loyalists into IGs offices — as he has done at the DOJ, the FBI and other agencies — remains to be seen. For now, the IG office at Interior, if diminished, is still functioning and Greenblatt urges his former colleagues there to “keep your head high and keep doing what you’re doing and let the work — fair, objective, independent oversight — shine through.”