Democrats in Congress like Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Maxine Waters, D-Calif., are criticizing President Donald Trump’s firing of 17 inspectors general, including in the departments of State, Transportation, Labor, Interior, Energy, and Commerce, claiming that doing so “without due cause is antithetical to good government.”

There is a very strong argument to be made that those inspectors general failed to do their jobs during the past four years. Their failures provide Trump with all of the “due cause” he needs.

Just two examples suffi ce: their failure to investigate the misbehavior of their departments in attempting to interfere in the 2022 and 2024 federal elections and in using government resources to violate the First Amendment rights of American citizens and censor their opinions and social media accounts.

Hard to think of anything more “antithetical to good government” than such outrageous conduct. Plus, one would think the president realizes that if partisans like Raskin and Waters are criticizing him, he must be doing the right thing.

The job of a federal inspector general is straightforward. Under applicable federal law, they are tasked with conducting investigations to root out “fraud and abuse” in the “programs and operations” of their agencies. That obviously includes investigating malfeasance and misbehavior by agency personnel that violates federal law, wastes taxpayer funds, misuses congressional appropriations, and goes beyond the narrowly defined statutory authority of the agency.

In 2021, then-President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing all federal agencies,including every one of the agencies whose inspectors general were fired, to get involved in state election administration. The agencies had to implement “strategic” plans to use agency personnel and resources to persuade and “assist” members of the public who interacted with those agencies to register and vote in federal elections. That included providing access to “vote-by-mail ballot applications,” identification documents, and multilingual voting materials.

Biden even told the agencies to solicit third-party organizations to “provide voter registration services on agency premises,” virtually guaranteeing that liberal, left-wing allies who wanted to keep Biden and his party in office would have access to every member of the public interacting with the federal government in official settings.

Think about that for a moment. What possible business is it of the Energy or Commerce or Transportation departments to play a role–any role–in our elections? Zero. Zip. Zilch.

Numerous secretaries of state complained about this interference in their administration of elections. Moreover, Biden had no constitutional or statutory authority to interfere in the election process. All of the federal employees who were participating in this not-so-subtle Democrat get-out-the-vote campaign using government resources and taxpayer funding were violating the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies and employees from spending funds on activities that Congress has not authorized and for which Congress has not appropriated funding.

Congress never appropriated any funding for any federal agency in the executive branch to engage in voter registration and ballot activities, with only one exception: the Federal Voting Assistance Program office at the Pentagon that helps overseas military personnel and their families.

Yet not a single inspector general investigated any of these illegal activities and illegal spending of taxpayer funds at any of their agencies. Why not?

Worse still, these same agencies refused to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests from outside groups who tried to get information on what the agencies were doing to comply with Biden’s executive order. Wouldn’t you think that an inspector general would have a problem with an agency stonewalling the public and acting outside of its charter?

[ Hans von Spakovsky is the manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.]