Donald Trump has fired more than a dozen inspectors general, officials who provide independent oversight of federal agencies. At least five of them worked at agencies with previous or ongoing investigations of Elon Musk’s business practices.
Late one Friday night, just weeks into his second term, President Donald Trump (likely illegally) fired more than a dozen inspectors general, the independent watchdogs charged with overseeing operations at federal agencies and auditing allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse of power. At least five of those inspectors general came from agencies currently leading or that previously led investigations into Elon Musk’s businesses, many of which hold billions of dollars in government contracts.
In the 2024 election, Musk spent $288 million to help get Trump elected, joining him at rallies and using his online platform to boost his presidential campaign. Now that Trump is in office, the unelected billionaire has taken an unprecedented role in his administration, leading the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, muscling his way into federal agencies, and sowing chaos throughout the civil service.
At the same time, he and his companies are poised to benefit from Trump’s late-night purge of inspectors general, which could disrupt ongoing inquiries into SpaceX, Tesla, and Musk’s other business entanglements.
At the Department of Agriculture (USDA), where the inspector general’s office was probing alleged animal abuse at Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink, inspector general and twenty-two-year USDA veteran Phyllis Fong was escorted out of her office by security guards last Monday. Department of Defense inspector general Robert Storch was fired just months after he reportedly opened a review of repeated failures by Musk and his rocket company SpaceX to properly disclose their contacts with foreign leaders.
The Department of Transportation, which oversees the National Transportation Safety Board, had its inspector general fired as safety regulators oversaw several open probes into Tesla, Musk’s electrical vehicle company, over its remote and self-driving vehicles. The same goes for the Environmental Protection Agency, where investigators have settled multiple lawsuits with Tesla in recent years over Clean Air Act and hazardous waste law violations.
Trump also fired the inspector general at the Department of Labor, which oversees the National Labor Relations Board. The board has seventeen open investigations against Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX for alleged unfair labor practices, safety violations, and discriminatory work practices.
Musk has also clashed with the Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service, which conducted a review of Starbase, Musk’s rocket launch facility in Texas. When the wildlife regulators said in 2023 that it would need upward of a year for additional review of its potential impacts on endangered species, Musk took aim at the government agency: “It is absurd that SpaceX can build a rocket faster than they can shuffle paperwork!”
Musk’s tangled web of open investigations is further complicated by his lucrative business arrangements with the federal government. Altogether, Musk’s companies were awarded $3 billion across nearly one hundred different contracts in 2023 — and account for at least $15.4 billion in government funding in the past decade.
As Musk has forced his way into the upper echelons of the federal government, Trump may have just made oversight efforts on the tech billionaire’s empire disappear.
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