Trump’s Aggression Tests Grassley, Senate GOP Oversight Champion

After President Donald Trump fired two federal watchdogs in 2020, Sen. Chuck Grassley defied the leader of his party.

The Iowa Republican — who for over four decades has cultivated a reputation as someone who challenged Democratic and Republican administrations alike — blocked two Trump nominees for roles at the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department. The administration had failed to give Congress the required advance notice for the terminations.

But when Trump returned to office this year with a more aggressive approach and removed inspectors general at 18 federal agencies, Grassley’s response was more muted. He sent Trump a letter on Jan. 28 requesting answers, saying “this is a matter of public and congressional accountability.” The administration took eight months to respond to it. Meanwhile, Grassley, as chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, kept Trump’s judicial and US attorney nominees moving through his panel when he could have delayed their progress to exert pressure on the White House.

Grassley’s contrasting tactics illustrate how the senator has strayed from the fierce independence he has long placed at the center of his public persona, legal veterans, including some former Grassley allies, and fellow lawmakers say.

“Senator Grassley has made an enormous name for himself with his tough on all malefactors approach to oversight,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), a member of the Judiciary Committee. “But the Senate under Trump has abandoned that.”

Grassley, 92, the sixth longest-serving US senator ever, has a powerful platform. For decades, he has promoted his support of internal watchdogs charged with finding waste, misconduct, and abuses inside the federal government.

He has blocked nominees from presidents of both parties in response to actions with which he disagreed. He has also held top executive branch officials in contempt for not answering his inquiries.

But in Trump’s second term, Grassley has adopted a more tepid response to a White House that has aggressively asserted its power, stretched the law, and fired many of the watchdogs Grassley has long championed.

Questions about Grassley’s approach come as Trump has pushed to expand presidential power on issues ranging from trade to military conflict to federal spending with little GOP pushback. Heading into the president’s second year, lawmakers and political analysts alike are watching whether Trump reaches further, and if Congress cedes more ground.

The senator’s critics cite Grassley’s investigation of the Biden administration instead of focusing on the current White House and its boundary-breaking actions, including its prosecution of perceived enemies, its military strikes in the Caribbean and slashing congressionally approved spending.

Grassley’s shift is a microcosm of how many senators have bowed to Trump’s power, even on subjects central to their political identities.

“I have been puzzled and disappointed by his apparent lack of interest in continuing in his own tradition of rigorous oversight,” said Gregg Nunziata, former chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority during President George W. Bush’s administration. Nunziata now serves as executive director for the Society for the Rule of Law, a group founded by conservative Trump critics who say they’re fighting for adherence to democratic principles.

Sitting in the Senate President Pro Tempore office at the Capitol last month, Grassley said his oversight approach has not wavered and that he’s treated the second Trump administration the same as any previous presidency.

“It’s hard to quantify oversight, so I wouldn’t want to say I’m doing more oversight under Trump than I did under George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan,” Grassley told Bloomberg Law.

Regardless of who is in the White House, he said, his approach hasn’t changed.

“I’m just going to say I’ve been doing it the same way for 45 years, and it doesn’t make much difference.”

Oversight Approach

Grassley’s protection of inspectors general is core to his belief in the importance of oversight on the executive branch. Nonpartisan government watchdog organizations see Trump’s firings of inspectors generals as an attempt to evade accountability as his perceived loyalists lead federal agencies.

One such organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the firings “an unprecedented attack” on “government accountability.”

Meant to be nonpartisan, inspectors general have usually been exempt from presidential turnover. That’s why the law requires presidents to give Congress 30-days notice if they plan on firing one.

They should be “almost wholly free of supervision” Grassley told Bloomberg Law, adding that they help him fulfill his congressional responsibilities.

That conviction led Grassley to block one of President Barack Obama’s agency nominees after the president fired the AmeriCorps inspector general, alleging the president did so without sufficient explanation. When Trump fired two inspectors general in 2020 with little explanation, Grassley delayed votes on two nominees and moved on a bill that would mandate presidents give substantive reasons for removing or transferring the watchdogs.

The senator characterized the 2020 move in a Washington Post opinion piece as part of his “largely lonesome, four-decade crusade to promote government oversight.”

Facing another round of firings this year, Grassley pointed to the federal courts’ role in interpreting the law when there’s a dispute between the president and Congress. A federal judge in September ruled that Trump’s dismissals violated notice requirements, but didn’t order the inspector generals reinstated because the president had the power to fire them again if Trump followed the rule.

The administration waited until the day of the ruling — eight months after the firings — to answer a letter Grassley and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the top Senate Judiciary Democrat, sent raising concerns about the dismissals.

Grassley said any comparisons between his current actions and those during the first Trump administration would be inaccurate.

“There’s a different reason for doing every hold up,” he said. “I don’t look at I do something today because I did it that way yesterday. I do it for making decisions at the particular time.”

Critics, he added, “aren’t looking at Chuck Grassley for 45 years in the United States Senate doing oversight work.”

But following the first wave of firings this year, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor who led George W. Bush’s Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in the legal analysis publication Lawfare in January that Grassley’s response was “weak stuff.”

Provisions requiring advance notice were “likely unconstitutional,” Goldsmith wrote, but “the ultimate fate of IG independence” depends on whether Congress “stands up for them now.”

Mark Greenblatt, the Interior Department inspector general appointed by Trump in the first administration but fired this year, said he was “disappointed” by what he described as Grassley’s “soft touch” approach compared to his past as a “battering ram” protecting watchdogs.

“Everything that could go wrong is going wrong,” he said.

Current and former aides say Grassley still exerts strong oversight. Critics, they say, hold him to a standard they don’t apply to other senators. Few Democrats, they note, openly defied President Joe Biden.

“Senator Grassley has done far more to hold the Trump administration accountable than I’ve ever seen anyone on the other side of the aisle do to hold administrations of their same party accountable,” said Tristan Leavitt, a former Senate Judiciary investigator who now works at Empower Oversight representing whistleblowers against the Biden administration.

One of the most prominent examples, his supporters say, is Grassley’s defense of the “blue slip,” a practice that allows senators to block certain judicial and US attorney nominees in their home states.

Trump called for abolishing the practice, hoping to get around Democratic blockades. Republican Senate leaders have opposed the idea. Grassley, as chairman, has maintained the practice.

In most instances, Grassley and Trump are aligned. Senior aides said that as a Republican and Trump supporter, he agrees with much of the president’s agenda.

Even Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, while frustrated with the GOP majority, avoided criticizing Grassley directly.

“I think the whole Republican Party is under a lot more pressure, because in my lifetime, I don’t think we’ve ever seen an administration remotely as thuggish as this administration,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said, echoing Democratic complaints about Trump using the federal government to attack perceived adversaries and reward loyal friends.

‘Blind Eye’

To his critics, Grassley’s approach to the current Trump administration was embodied by his handling of the Oct. 7 hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi.

One of the most high-ranking figures in the administration responsible for overseeing prosecutions of Trump’s perceived enemies, Bondi arrived with notes showing pre-planned attacks on Democratic senators. She frequently unleashed broadsides rather than answer lawmakers’ questions about her department and its actions.

When Durbin, Illinois’s senior senator, asked for the rationale behind sending Texas National Guard troops to Chicago, Bondi fired back, “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump.”

To Democrats, it was a sign of Republicans accepting behavior that once would have been intolerable.

When Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) complained about Bondi’s attacks on senators, Grassley responded by criticizing their harsh treatment of FBI Director Kash Patel at a previous hearing.

“He’s been one of the administration’s biggest enablers,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said of Grassley. “The way he’s run the Judiciary Committee, is that Trump could do no wrong.”

Grassley noted that he blocked three Treasury Department nominees this year over Trump’s expected crackdown on renewable energy tax breaks, a critical issue for Iowa. He also introduced a bill to reassert Congress’ trade authority amid Trump’s sweeping tariff regime. Republican leaders have stonewalled it, and Trump threatened a veto.

The senator’s oversight this year, though, has largely focused on the Biden administration and prosecutors who pursued criminal charges against Trump.

He launched an investigation into the Biden Justice Department’s probe into Trump’s attempts to overturn the lawful 2020 presidential election results. He called that inquiry “arguably worse than Watergate” in an Oct. 6 statement, and echoes Trump’s claims that he was unfairly targeted.

“I’m going to make sure that everybody is exposed — and the documents prove it — for the eight years, the eight years that the opposition was trying to put President Trump in prison,” Grassley said in July at Iowa’s State Fairgrounds, referring to investigations during Trump’s first term and his stint out of office.

He continued that crusade this week, releasing records,including internal agency emails, that he says show the FBI’s 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was “a miscarriage of justice.”

Changing Iowa

Elected to the House in 1974 and Senate in 1980, Grassley is one of the most durable figures in congressional history.

He’s built a reputation as a lawmaker who targets government abuses.

In 1984, when President Ronald Reagan’s attorney general failed to turn over documents, Grassley held him in contempt of Congress. When Air Force officials that year blocked a whistleblower from testifying before a Grassley-led subcommittee on defense spending, the senator drove to the Pentagon in his orange Chevy Chevette and hand delivered a subpoena.

“He was extremely brave,” said Dina Rasor, who aided Grassley’s defense spending oversight in the 1980s as founder of what’s now the Project on Government Oversight. “Back then junior senators were expected to sit down, shut up, and learn. But Grassley goes in there and he starts stirring up trouble.”

“Now,” she said, “every time I see him get up and say something, it hurts me.”

Grassley has thrived, even as the politics of the GOP and Iowa have changed.

The state twice supported Obama, but it has become dominated by Republicans after Trump reshaped the party by winning over White, working class voters. Trump won Iowa by 13 percentage points last year, after Obama won it by more than five in 2012.

“He does support the president being successful,” said Jennifer Davis, Grassley’s chief of staff and an aide of nearly 15 years. “Iowans want Trump. They voted for him overwhelmingly.”

Watchdog Purge

When he returned to office, Trump removed watchdogs at 18 agencies within days of his inauguration, including at the Agriculture and Veteran Affairs departments.

This year’s purge surpasses those of recent presidents, including Trump’s first administration during which he fired five. Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush didn’t fire any inspectors general. Obama and Biden each removed one.

Grassley has long supported keeping such watchdogs independent. But he has taken a more discreet approach this year.

The senator’s staff has met with White House counsel since the first wave of inspectors general firings, “seeking to understand the White House’s position regarding Grassley’s Securing Inspector General Independence Act,” Grassley spokesperson Clare Slattery said in a statement.

Still, on Oct. 15 — roughly two weeks after the court ruling on some of Trump’s initial firings — the president ousted the Export-Import Bank inspector general without giving Congress proper notice.

Grassley scolded Trump on social media for flouting the law — just two days after his staff met with Bloomberg Law about his handling of the firings.

The president “takes an oath to uphold the constitution & the laws but he hasn’t told Congress he was firing” the inspector general, Grassley said Oct. 17 on the social media app X.

Emilia DiSanto, an ex-chief investigative counsel for Grassley on the Senate Finance Committee and former deputy inspector general in the State Department, said a behind-the-scenes focus on oversight can sometimes yield better results.

“Every administration has its own personality and its own likes and dislikes. You have to be strategic about what issues are in the public fight,” she said.

Grassley’s team shared an October email with Bloomberg Law from the Federal Reserve Board inspector general Michael Horowitz, expressing “many thanks” for what staffers “and Sen. Grassley have been doing to support the IG community in these very difficult times.”

In recent days, Grassley has shown some signs of frustration with the administration.

At a Dec. 11 hearing, he publicly scolded Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for declining two invitations this month to testify before the Judiciary committee for an oversight hearing.

“When is she gonna pay attention to the Senate?” Grassley said at the hearing.