Exclusive: Trump Fired This Top Watchdog. Now He’s Speaking Out.

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

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4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

Fraud, waste, and abuse: That’s what inspectors general are tasked with investigating throughout the federal government. But in his first week in office, President Donald Trump did something unprecedented. He fired at least 17 IGs—more than any president in history—without notifying Congress or providing a substantive rationale for doing so, both of which are required by federal statute.

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with one of those fired IGs, Larry Turner of the US Department of Labor, in his first full interview since being let go. Turner says the kind of fraud that Elon Musk’s DOGE says it has found within days isn’t actually possible to uncover as quickly as Musk claims. And he describes Trump’s effort to oust inspectors general like himself as a threat to democracy itself.

Read: Trump Ousts Multiple Government Watchdogs in a Late-Night Purge (Mother Jones)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Why do you think this is one of the first moves from the Trump administration to get rid of the inspectors general?
0:08.5	I think it was intentional. It was a power play. It was a power of purge to get rid of the people, the watchdogs that actually provide oversight.
0:16.2	And as you saw, we were the first group for that to happen to. And then since that time two months ago,
0:22.1	now you begin to see, you saw a lot of other watchdogs and other different areas of the
0:25.7	government. So that is why it appeared that this was an intent to remove any oversight.
0:33.1	On this week's more to the story, I talk with Larry Turner, the former Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Labor.
0:40.0	He was one of more than a dozen IGs across the government who was fired by President Trump.
0:45.7	What that was like and what losing inspectors general means for the country.
0:50.2	Coming up.
1:00.2	Hey, it's Alan.
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1:56.0	Thank you. This is more to the story. I'm Al Letson. One of the first moves President Trump made when he came into office
2:00.0	was to get rid of a key
2:01.7	layer of oversight within the federal government that most of us might not even know it's
2:06.4	there. Inspectors General. For the last 50 years, IGs have been crucial in unearthing and
	...

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