Nominees for inspector general (IG) positions in three federal agencies dodged questions from senators during their confirmation hearings Thursday on whether they would hold the Trump administration accountable for breaking the law.
Those nominees included William Kirk for the Small Business Administration, Anthony D’Esposito for the Department of Labor, and Platte Moring for the Department of Defense – which the Trump administration has rebranded as the Department of War.
The confirmation hearings come as President Donald Trump has fired or demoted about two dozen IGs since taking office in January. IGs serve as federal investigators assigned to agencies to keep a close eye on their activities and report back to Congress.
President Trump also withheld funding from the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency at the start of the new fiscal year, causing multiple IG websites to go dark.
“To the three inspector general nominees today, I am concerned about your ability to conduct effective oversight, given the president’s attacks on IG independence,” Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told the nominees in his opening remarks.
D’Esposito in particular, Peters said, has “made no effort to address concerns that [he is] a partisan operative,” adding that the Labor nominee’s opening statement to the committee “includes a pledge to carry out the president’s agenda as an inspector general. This betrays a very deep misunderstanding of the role of what an IG actually is.”
In his written statement submitted to the committee, D’Esposito wrote, “I am proud to support his agenda, and I am even prouder to carry that mission forward through the work of the Office of Inspector General.”
During the hearing, D’Esposito said he did not make legal choices based on political ideologies while working as an investigator within the New York City Police Department.
“Never once – and I worked for a few different mayors, definitely I [didn’t] agree with their political ideologies – but never once did I start an investigation, conduct an investigation, or make an arrest based on someone’s political ideologies, because you follow the law – that’s your job,” said D’Esposito.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., asked Moring if he would investigate a reported Interagency Weaponization Working Group, made up of officials from various agencies aimed at aiding President Trump in retribution against his perceived enemies. Moring responded that such a group would not be “within the remit of the inspector general.”
“The idea that our intelligence community, of which I was a proud member, would be turned against American citizens because of their alleged political views is as fundamental to who we are as anything that I’ve seen come before this committee, and I want you to say, separate from what your remit would be … that we’‘re not going to turn agencies … against the American people,” Slotkin told Moring.
“And you are the last line of defense. You are an IG,” she added.
Meanwhile, Edward Forst, President Trump’s nominee for administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), said he would further investigate federal agencies’ use of Grok, the artificial intelligence system developed by xAI, which is owned by former senior White House Advisor Elon Musk.
That system, Peters said, has been found to generate antisemitic and biased content, and asked whether Forst would temporarily halt its use. Grok won a GSA OneGov deal and is deployed throughout the Pentagon.
The content “would concern me, and I’d like to learn more,” Forst said, and agreed with Peters that it could send “the signal we would [not] necessarily want to send to the country.”