John -
In early April, President Trump removed trusted longtime government watchdog Glenn Fine from his role as acting inspector general at the Department of Defense, replacing him with Sean O’Donnell, who was also serving as the EPA’s inspector general. Here at CREW, we were surprised by the abrupt move—and outraged at the President’s latest assault on independent oversight.
It turns out high ranking officials at the EPA were shocked and caught off-guard too. Documents obtained by CREW via a Freedom of Information Act investigation include emails that make clear that staffers in the EPA IG’s office were surprised and concerned about O’Donnell’s ability to conduct thorough oversight at two different agencies simultaneously. Read more here.
Fine was ousted a week after he had been selected to chair the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which is charged with conducting oversight of key parts of the coronavirus response. By demoting Fine to Principal Deputy IG, Trump made him ineligible to chair the committee—and the committee then went without a chair for weeks. CREW and others strongly suspected that weakening coronavirus oversight was the motivation for ousting Fine—and as the new records reveal, EPA staff appeared to share the same suspicions.
When CREW begins a FOIA investigation, we don’t always know what records we’ll receive—or how hard we’ll have to fight for access. Sometimes, we get the receipts showing questionable ways the Trump administration spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars, sometimes we get records catching President Trump in a lie, and sometimes it takes years before we get anything at all. But no matter what we get, we know that fighting for transparency and accountable government matters—and we’ll keep up the fight no matter what.
Thank you,
Noah Bookbinder
Executive Director, CREW
