Washington
CNN
—
The Office of Special Counsel has for nearly 50 years been the US government’s one-stop shop for whistleblowers and alleged ethics violations, a federal watchdog created after Watergate with the lofty mandate “to end government and political corruption.”
Now it appears to be facing its biggest test yet, as insiders and independent watchdogs raise alarms that the historically nonpartisan agency has been “captured” by loyalists from the very administration it’s supposed to police.
In their eyes, a difficult situation got even worse a few weeks ago when President Donald Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to lead the agency. Ingrassia, a self-described “true MAGA loyalist,” has embraced calls to crack down on the supposed anti-Trump “deep state” within the federal workforce.
Though Ingrassia will need to be confirmed by the Republican-led Senate, his nomination has already fueled speculation that he’ll transform the agency into a political tool to promote Trump’s agenda and punish the president’s enemies.
In interviews with CNN, nearly a dozen former federal ethics officials, lawyers with pending cases at OSC, and outside experts said that changes have already pushed whistleblowers away from the agency and toward Congress, the press, or to inspectors general at federal agencies.
Some are having second thoughts about coming forward in the first place.
Tom Devine, a lawyer at the nonpartisan Government Accountability Project who has represented whistleblowers since the 1970s, told CNN that some of his clients are reluctant to move forward with allegations of wrongdoing and cover-ups at federal agencies because they’re scared of what Trump loyalists at OSC might do.
“For years, the OSC has been our first option to help whistleblowers,” Devine said. “If Ingrassia is confirmed, our mission will be reversed. Our duty will be to warn whistleblower about entrusting their rights to OSC because it would be an act of professional suicide.”
Ingrassia declined to comment.
OSC spokesman Corey Williams said in an email that, “we do not share those concerns” that the agency will become a partisan tool under Ingrassia.
The OSC safeguards the nonpartisan nature of the civil service by enforcing the Hatch Act, which bars political activity by federal employees, and investigates whistleblowers’ claims about waste, fraud, or abuse — and also protects those whistleblowers from retaliation.
The agency usually operates away from the spotlight, but there have been scandals over the years. Reagan’s appointee was accused of politicizing the office, and George W Bush’s was given a brief jail sentence after being found to be involved in an illegal cover-up.
The office made waves during Trump’s first term when it recommended that he fire his advisor Kellyanne Conway for campaigning from the White House, and when it later rebuked Cabinet members for appearing at the 2020 Republican convention. It also ruffled the Biden White House at times, calling out some top aides for their political activity.
A hallmark of recent OSC leaders has been a willingness to buck the party line. These rebukes against top Trump officials came when OSC was run by a Trump-appointed Republican, and the Biden-era rebukes came under a Biden-appointed Democrat.
But a few weeks into his second term, Trump fired the Senate-confirmed agency leader, Hampton Dellinger, a Biden appointee. Under federal law, Dellinger’s term didn’t expire until 2029, and he could only be dismissed for cause, which Trump did not provide. (Dellinger mounted a brief and unsuccessful lawsuit to get his job back.)
With Dellinger gone, Trump allies at OSC unwound his efforts to reinstate thousands of probationary federal employees that were fired in February as part of the Trump administration’s mass layoffs. They also loosened longstanding guidelines and started allowing federal workers to wear campaign gear – like MAGA hats – while on the job.
A former federal ethics official said the current turmoil has already damaged the OSC’s independence, because “even if the president appoints someone very credible and qualified, they can now be fired on a whim.”
“The office is a shell of its former self,” the former federal ethics official told CNN in an interview. A second former federal ethics official said OSC “is already a paper tiger.”
Into this, new fears were injected last month when Trump nominated Ingrassia to be the new head of the office.
Though the president praised Ingrassia as a “highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar,” critics say they doubt the 30-year-old was fit for the job.
Federal law requires the leader of OSC to be an attorney who, “by demonstrated ability, background, training, or experience, is especially qualified to carry out the functions of the position.”
Ingrassia graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022. An election denier, Ingrassia hosted a far-right podcast and wrote articles for the right-wing conspiracy website Gateway Pundit, often drawing reposts from Trump himself.
“It is hard to see how someone can argue that a nominee who graduated law school just three years ago and has never worked in this area of the law, is anything other than patently unqualified,” said David Kligerman of Whistleblower Aid, a nonpartisan organization that represents whistleblowers at OSC and other agencies.
An avid social media user, Ingrassia posted on X that at the OSC, he “will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch.”
“Alarm bells are ringing off the hook, not just for the next four years, but this is setting us back 50 years,” said Donald Sherman, the top lawyer for the liberal-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Even if his credentials weren’t so glaringly unfit for this role, his extreme partisanship would be disqualifying on its own.”
White House spokesman Harrison Fields praised Ingrassia’s service in the Trump administration and said he’ll continue to be an ally.
“The eleventh-hour smear campaign will not deter the President from supporting (Ingrassia’s) nomination, and the administration continues to have full confidence in his ability to advance the President’s agenda,” Fields told CNN in an email last week.
Despite the Trump administration’s confidence in OSC, some whistleblowers are already shunning the office.
Devine, the accountability lawyer, told CNN that clients of his who say they have witnessed a public health cover-up at the Environmental Protection Agency, and wrongdoing at the Department of Homeland Security on handling child trafficking are reluctant to move forward with their reports because of concerns about the Trump loyalists at OSC.
Other lawyers who spoke to CNN said they are suggesting that whistleblowers go to inspectors general instead.
That’s where former Trump administration official Miles Taylor filed his recent complaints. Taylor claims Trump stripped him of a security clearance and ordered the Justice Department to investigate him as punishment for his anonymous anti-Trump op-ed in 2018 and for campaigning against him in 2020 and 2024.
“Traditional avenues for government whistleblowers to raise concerns have become dangerous,” Taylor told CNN, adding that it’s now challenging to discern “who is friend or foe” at federal agencies.
A Democratic congressional source familiar with the matter told CNN they’ve seen an uptick of whistleblowers coming forward to Congress, compared to the previous session.
Rep. Stephen Lynch, the acting top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said, “if whistleblowers do not feel comfortable reporting wrongdoing to another one of Trump’s cronies, our doors are always open.”
CNN’s Annie Grayer contributed to this report.
