Government agency to review health and safety effects of Trump's mass firings
WASHINGTON – An independent government watchdog agency will probe how President Donald Trump's mass firings of early-tenure employees affect air travel, the spread of diseases, nuclear safety, food safety, veterans health care, the opioid epidemic, and the ability to respond to floods and wildfires.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan watchdog agency that investigates, audits, and evaluates government operations for Congress, said it would open the investigation in response to a March 6 request from a group of 11 Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
States, workers, unions, nonprofits, and an independent watchdog have all brought legal challenges to the Trump administration's firings of tens of thousands of federal employees in their probationary periods, and federal judges have reinstated many. But little information is available about the downstream effects of having fewer workers.
"Rather than make government more efficient, these firings appear to have created massive inefficiencies and put the American people at risk," the Democratic senators wrote. They called the Trump administration’s approach "indiscriminate" and pointed to their attempts to rehire nuclear safety and food safety workers after the firings.
The Democratic senators pointed to attempts to fire workers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Aviation Administration and a mental health agency, among others.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Paste BN in February: "President Trump returned to Washington with a mandate from the American people to bring about unprecedented change in our federal government to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse." He added, "This isn’t easy to do in a broken system entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, but it’s a task long overdue."
The GAO wrote in its letter that it would check with inspectors general, independent watchdogs who work in executive branch agencies, to see if it was duplicating efforts. Trump fired 17 inspectors general in the first week of his presidency, according to Reuters.
Contributing: Dinah Voyles Pulver, Joey Garrison, Zac Anderson, and Terry Collins, Paste BN