Trump Fires EPA Watchdog Who Closely Scrutinized Biden’s Agency

The surprise dismissal of the EPA’s inspector general has left agency veterans puzzled, given Sean O’Donnell’s track record in recovering money and scrutinizing waste within the agency.

Under O’Donnell’s leadership, the Office of Inspector General aggressively scrutinized a wide range of EPA activities during the Biden administration, with a special focus on the grant funding under the infrastructure and climate laws. The office was also sharply critical of high-profile agency efforts like its clean school bus and lead service line funding programs.

O’Donnell was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020.

“It’s very interesting. It’s almost like it didn’t matter” that O’Donnell found more than $2 billion in monetary impacts last year, said Stan Meiburg, a longtime EPA staffer and former acting deputy administrator who is no longer with the agency.

The office filed more than 60 reports in 2024 and took part in joint investigations leading to 29 criminal charges, 12 indictments, and five convictions. Its work brought in $1.7 million in criminal fines and $2.6 million in administrative recoveries.

“Why the Trump administration would decide to fire him, other than that he was an IG and they wanted to put someone else in there who they thought they could have more control over, I have no idea,” said Meiburg, now executive director of Wake Forest University’s environment and sustainability center.

The EPA inspector general’s office didn’t respond to an interview request. O’Donnell has been removed from the EPA inspector general’s website.

Mandy Gunasekara, the former EPA chief of staff in Trump’s first term, said she found the firing unsurprising.

In her view, the office should have focused on the wrongful disbursement of grant money to third-party groups engaged in political work, laid out in a November report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

But “instead of addressing these obvious instances of taxpayer waste, fraud, and abuse, the EPA IG’s office focused on politically charged investigations going after numerous former Trump appointees,” Gunasekara said. “Overall, no one should be surprised with the EPA IG’s removal.”

In a book published last year, Gunasekara wrote that she was approached by the office under the Biden administration in connection with a criminal investigation.

O’Donnell recently said the office would spend 2025 “leveraging new tools and expertise outside of the environmental space.”

O’Donnell’s weekend ouster came as part of a group of inspectors general who were let go across the government.

“The reasons why inspectors general have so much influence and impact are their independence and non-partisanship,” said Kevin Minoli, former EPA acting general counsel and now a partner at Alston & Bird LLP. “By terminating the inspectors general en masse, President Trump risks politicizing the role and, as a result, significantly lessening their importance.”

The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency responded to Trump’s mass firings by saying the president must give Congress 30 days notice before removing an inspector general, and that he or she must also provide a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told Fox News Sunday that Trump “has a right to get in there who he wants.”