Week 2: It just continues

At the risk of doing the very thing I was advocating against doing the other day, this is another Outrage Post regarding POTUS47. Triaging the firehose of fascist actions is proving to be awfully difficult, what with so many things being RED ALERT level nightmares.

45/47 and his flunkies, with apparent heavy involvement from Elon Musk, have invited Federal workers to quit by implying an offer of nonexistent severance packages. They have violated the Impoundment Act and have indicated they will do it again and again. 45/47 flew a planeful of deportees to Colombia in chains on a flight with torturous conditions, got into a social media slapfight with Colombia over it, traded concessions, and crowed to the MAGA dupes that he'd just pwned Colombia when they in fact succeeded with their demand that deportees be treated humanely and not escorted by armed soldiers (45/47 won a concession from Colombia allowing him to continue using military planes). He claimed that he'd sent the MILITARY into CALIFORNIA to turn his imaginary spigot on to give Los Angeles more water and crowed about it as some sort of real achievement when it was all in his imagination. His OMB nominee perjured himself in admitting during a Senate hearing that he champions the Big Lie.

All of that is horrifying and that barely scratched the surface of what's gone down in the past two days.

My top-line concern for this brief time period, though, is the attempted firing of at least 17 inspectors general. (This actually happened on Friday night—when administrations often will, in West Wing parlance, "take out the trash" when the fewest people will notice—but I'm catching up to it late. Triage is hard.)

The Office of Inspector General was established in 1976 as one of the post-Nixon reforms designed to protect the nation from a corrupt chief executive and/or corrupt government officials. The job of Inspectors General is to weed out waste, fraud, and abuse in the executive branch of the Federal government. Initially this office was limited to a dozen IGs in the department of Health and Human Services, later it was expanded to cover other agencies and departments. There are now 72 IG positions, tasked with policing waste, fraud, and abuse by policy and policymakers.

45/47 tried to fire 17-20 of them (reports vary on the number), all without cause.

To no one's surprise, the firings are illegal. Inspectors General operate independent of an administration, and though a president can fire them for cause, he must submit a written rationale for the firing to Congress and give 30 days' notice. The only rationale made in this case was that the firings were "due to changing priorities." Since the only purpose of IGs is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, this was a tacit admission by the POTUS47 administration that their priorities are to not root out waste, fraud, and abuse. Couple that with all of the actions taken in the administration's first nine days and the obvious conclusion is they want to commit vast amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse and not be held accountable for it.

Which, I know, shocker. Who'd have though that a guy who headed up a fraudulent "charity" and a fraudulent "university," who routinely refuses to pay contractors, who grifts as frequently as he breathes, would be up to his cotton-candy-swirl combover in waste, fraud, and abuse?

It's not the first time a Republican president has tried to purge IGs, of course. Reagan fired the lot of them (there were only 16 then) in 1981 only to rehire five of them under pressure from Congress. Bush41 also tried to fire the whole lot but was thwarted by backlash from within and without the government. 45/47 fired several during his first term after his first impeachment.

Among other things, this move puts the lie to what Musk's "job" really is. We were told, after all, that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was there to find waste and identify inefficiencies. No, no, turns out they're just fine with waste—remember that planeful of shackled and sweltering deportees forced to sit in their own urine? They, and all planned future deportations, were on military aircraft at enormous expense, costing the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the typical method of chartering a traditional civilian-style jet in order to give the whole thing more machismo and, probably, to allow for more control over how poorly the passengers can be treated; in past years there were typically dozens of such flights per week, so even if we're conservative in our estimates, this administration is choosing to spend around a billion dollars or more, annually, on unnecessary photo ops and cruelty. If you're looking for efficiency and budget trimming, you want the IGs—actions taken by Inspectors General save the U.S. billions of dollars every year, at least they used to. No, Musk's real job is to be the unofficial Secretary of Corruption and Self-Dealing.

Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) are calling 45/47’s bluff, sending a letter to the president seeking clarification and rationale, as required by law, and noting, "IGs are critical to rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct within the Executive Branch bureaucracy, which you have publicly made clear you are also intent on doing." (Emphasis mine.) They know better, of course, they're just establishing a paper trail for the hypocrisy.

Maine senator Susan Collins, however, remains just as dense and clueless as always. She told reporters, "I don’t understand why one would fire individuals whose mission is to root out waste, fraud and abuse. So this leaves a gap in what I know is a priority for [POTUS47]." Really, Susan? You don't understand? I'll explain: He lied to you. It is not his priority, it is, in fact, the opposite of his priority. (How does Maine keep reelecting this person?) Susan, if you're still confused, go ask your fellow New England Senator, Elizabeth Warren. She sees it for what it is: “[POTUS47] is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”

45/47 has achieved his primary goal in running for another term: He escaped prison. Now he's on to secondary and tertiary goals: Inflict cruelty on people he hates and grift, grift, grift from the American people. Can't have oversight for that.

It's only Tuesday.