Monday morning musings for workplace watchers
DOL IG’s Future Still Unclear | Missing Links
Parker Purifoy: Department of Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito is still under fire for reportedly partisan activities while occupying what’s supposed to be a non-partisan post.
Citizens for Ethics in Washington filed a complaint against D’Esposito with the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, which oversees inspectors general across the government. The complaint calls on the council to investigate whether D’Esposito has violated any laws or professional ethics standards since taking office last year.
CREW pointed to news reports that D’Esposito is still considering a bid for his old congressional seat in New York that he lost in 2024 and that he had made public statements supporting President Donald Trump.
The inspector general is currently heading investigations into both Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who is accused of committing travel fraud and having an affair with her bodyguard, and the secretary’s husband Shawn DeRemer, who allegedly assaulted at least two female department employees late last year.
“While serving as inspector general, D’Esposito has blurred the lines between official duties and political activities,” CREW said in a statement. “This behavior impairs his ability to be independent, and reflects self-interest and bias incompatible with the role of an inspector general.”
D’Esposito has regularly shared and commented on social media posts from the White House, Trump, and JD Vance about political matters ranging from immigration, the conflict with Iran, and Trump’s presidential library in Florida.
While CIGIE doesn’t have the power to remove inspectors general for wrongdoing, it can conduct investigations and submit reports to Congress. The council’s quality standards state that IGs should be “free from conflicts of interest.”
“D’Esposito’s behavior, even in his very short time in office, reflects several threats that CIGIE has recognized as ones that impair the ability of an inspector general to be independent: self-interest, bias and undue influence,” CREW said in its complaint.
Questions about whether D’Esposito will be running for his old House seat have been swirling since his confirmation proceedings. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) questioned him at a hearing about whether he was actively campaigning, to which D’Esposito said no, but he dodged other questions about fundraising activities.
Blumenthal later called for an Office of Special Counsel investigation into D’Esposito for potentially violating the Hatch Act, pointing to Federal Election Commission filings that show D’Esposito’s political action committee gathered over $20,000 in 2025 and his campaign website is still active.
D’Esposito still has the opportunity to run for his former seat after the New York Conservative Party’s chosen candidate, John DeGrace, pulled out of the race last week. This gives the party until Tuesday to announce a subbed candidate.
Ian Kullgren: Two probes into the first Trump administration’s improper political activities have vanished from a government website.
While reporting another story, Punching In discovered that links on the Office of Special Counsel website now lead to a dead end, displaying “page not found” error messages. That effectively makes documents inaccessible to anyone trying to find them through mainstream news coverage, search engines, or congressional reports that linked to it.
One of the reports—a 59-page documentstill available via the Internet Archive—excoriated 13 of the president’s closest aides for using their public roles to campaign for Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election. Another report, released in 2018, urged Trump to fire senior counselor Kellyanne Conway for promoting Republican candidates and trashing Democrats ahead of the midterms that year.
Aides repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, a 1939 law that restricts the partisan political activities of federal employees, the OSC found. It described a “willful disregard” for the law on the part of the administration. The office at the time was headed by Henry Kerner, a Republican who is now acting Chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board.
In an email, OSC spokesman Corey Williams said the links were accidentally deactivated while the agency moves to a cloud-based web platform, and would be restored soon.
“We’re working on updating all the links,” he said.
After much digging, we were able to find working links buried in an archive of press releases. The findings were not available on the reports section of the website where they had lived for years, and didn’t appear in standard Google searches.
Days after taking office, Trump fired the Biden-appointed Special Counsel and sought to replace him with a loyalist, Paul Ingrassia, who eventually was forced to withdraw his bid over racist text messages.
“It reflects the inevitable political control now that the special counsel is an at-will employee of the president,” said Tom Devine, legal director of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Project. “You see it all across the board.”
Trump removed thousands of public records from government websites since retaking the White House. More recently, his administration was accused of tampering with the Epstein files.
It’s unlikely that laws were broken in removing the files from the website, said Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation for the National Archives and Records Administration.
Documents related to events that gain national media attention are protected under the law from permanent deletion, he said. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be buried.
“We have a right to know whether senior officials have violated the Hatch Act or any other law,” Baron said in an email. “Making these reports inaccessible undermines government accountability.”
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