Office Without Accountability: Interference, Oversight, and Political Corruption in Trump’s Presidency

Power attracts loyalty, but when loyalty is allowed to outrank accountability, corruption migrates from the margins of politics to its institutional core. In our book Political Corruption. The Internal Enemy of Publica Institutions (hereafter PC), we described this slide as a “deficit of office accountability,” which constitutes the conceptual and normative core of political corruption.

Conceptualized as a deficit of office accountability, political corruption indicates those instances when an officeholder cannot justify the rationale of their action in their institutional capacity by reference to the mandate of their role and the institution’s raison d’être (the set of ideals and values that justify the establishment of an institution and regulates its functioning—PC: 22‑27). This view of corruption is conceptualized to be quite specific about the kind of uses of power of office that count as episodes of corruption. But, at the same time, it is more encompassing than the mainstream picture, which foregrounds unlawful action for private gain, epitomized by the proverbial bad apples engaged in bribery.

In our understanding, political corruption may arise from a variety of motivations, and private gain is not always and necessarily among those. It can also involve practices aimed at consolidating political power for one’s party, such as nepotism and clientelism. So, the definition extends to cover behaviors like favoritism, state capture, and possibly some instances of lobbying. Importantly, not all these practices are necessarily illegal. Thus, in our view, while private enrichment and illegality often accompany political corruption, they are not among its defining features.

The accountability-deficit view of political corruption matters especially in those contexts where officeholders enjoy wide margins of discretion in the exercise of their power of office, and it is not entirely clear whether their action falls inside or outside the boundaries of legality and to whose benefit it accrues. Two decisions taken in the first fortnight of Donald Trump’s renewed presidency—the resurrection of “Schedule F” and a late‑night purge of federal Inspectors General—offer a near‑laboratory illustration of this dynamic of corruption and its threat to liberal‑democratic government.

Schedule F and the politicization of the civil service

On Inauguration Day, 20 January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order reviving—and expanding—the dormant Schedule F classification, stripping civil‑service protections from thousands of career officials in “policy‑determining” roles. The stated justification was strengthening presidential agency and “restoring accountability” by neutralizing a supposedly obstructive “deep state” shielded behind a machinery of bureaucratic proceduralism. A week later, The Washington Post detailed how the order would allow wholesale replacement of non‑partisan professionals with appointees chosen for personal loyalty. From their part, worker associations contested the reintroduction of Schedule F classification allowing the administration to bypass traditional hiring and firing practices, leading to a partisan workforce (AFGE; NTEU). These concerns echo studies that highlight the risks of consolidating presidential power around personal loyalty and governance by intimidation by threatening the removal of officeholders perceived as disloyal or politically antagonistic.

From the perspective of a public ethics of office accountability, the relevant question here is not so much or not only whether a president may legally reorganize the bureaucracy; it is whether the agenda underpinning that reorganization can be justified by reference to the democratic raison d’être that his office enacts and the ensuing terms of his role’s mandate. The civil service exists to provide stable, expertise‑based implementation of law across partisan turnovers. Trump’s administrative initiative risks transforming the civil service into a cadre of loyalists; it can, therefore, be seen as furthering an agenda—consolidating executive control—that could not qualify as justifiable by reference to the office mandate; where such a justificatory logic is altered, the exercise of the power of office is corrupt (PC: 67-70). Because of this the new logic of political appointment, neither other officials (agency heads, career managers, inspectors, courts) or citizens are in a position to demand a justification of staffing decisions in terms of merit and statutory mission. A corrupt practice thus kicks in that systemically undercuts the accountability of the administrative state.

The further implication is an increasing erosion of accountability structures in the public administration as such. Various studies have documented that more politicized bureaucracies tend to be less responsive to requests for information from Congress and the public—particularly when such requests come from the opposing political faction. This corrupt trend is backed by such shocking statements as that by Russ Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who declared: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.” Such rhetoric suggests a deliberate strategic agenda of intimidation replacing the accountability mechanisms which characterize the normal business of governmental agencies in a liberal democratic state.

It may well be that, as some have remarked, the takeover of the federal bureaucracy is unlikely to play out the way it is intended, but this does not change the fact that already at the programmatic level we have good reasons to think that planning the replacement of office accountability with fear and loyalty is an inherent act of political corruption.

The purge of Inspectors General

Four days after reinstating Schedule F, the President abruptly dismissed at least fifteen Senate‑confirmed Inspectors General (IGs), later rising to nineteen, in a late‑night order that sidestepped statutory notice requirements. By May, he had nominated replacements, several with overt partisan records or direct ties to the agencies they would monitor; one nominee had left Congress under allegations of using public payroll for personal relationships. IGs are designed as independent watchdogs against waste, fraud and abuse. Firing them en masse and replacing them with political allies looks as yet another instance of how democratic power of office can be misused for an agenda of shielding the executive from scrutiny.

To be sure, the mandate of the President of the United States legally includes the removal power. However, the arguable rationale for the exercise of that mandate must be aligned with the faithful execution of laws. For this reason, demands of justification have been expressed in several formal hearings. For example the House Energy & Commerce Democrats stated “Our Members deserve an opportunity to question why the Trump Administration has attempted to eliminate these Inspectors General and whether and to what extent internal agency oversight will continue in this Administration.” However, the President has been rather vague in offering justifications for the removal of the inspectors, mainly just alluding to their inimical attitude. Purging independent auditors because they are insufficiently deferential embodies a self-serving agenda that resonates with that underpinning the restoring of Schedule F. Such an alignment speaks of an administration engineering an institutional practice of systemic corruption: an institutional practice in which many officeholders (the President, agency leaders, compliant nominees) cooperate to undercut the very mechanisms meant to secure the accountability of power exercise (PC: 67‑70; 126‑28).

From the perspective of an ethics of office accountability, we can pinpoint how the deficit such a practice brings about is relational on various counts. First, and plainly, discharged IGs cannot demand reasons for their ouster that refer to their watchdog mandate; second, the Congress’s statutory expectation of independent oversight is frustrated. Institutional interactions are thus disrupted from within the boundaries of the institution. In this sense, corrupt uses of power of office work as trojan horses that undercut institutional well-functioning.

A single pattern of corruption

While Schedule F and the IG purge differ in legal detail, they also converge on a common structure. In each, an entrusted power of office (reform of the bureaucracy) is redirected to a rationale—loyalty enforcement and insulation from oversight—that cannot survive a demand for justification aligned with the officeholder’s mandate. The resulting interactions among officeholders are tainted by an interactive injustice  (PC:  94‑104): by their interrelated actions, officeholders are pressed into enacting, or at least not obstructing, an agenda that could not be defended as part of their roles and as coherent with the raison d’être of their agency. 

The rationale behind Trump’s action has often been explained as a reaction to the tendency of the administration to use to use their power of office to hinder political action they oppose on ideological grounds. However, empirical studies on career civil servants during the first Trump administration document that many were concerned about violating professional and institutional norms of accountability to their agency and the government, rather than preoccupied to offer partisan support to one or the other political faction. 

This accountability deficit has practical consequences. Career experts may self‑censor to avoid dismissal; whistleblowers lose protected channels; program performance data are skewed to please political supervisors. Yet, crucially, the interactive wrong of a disrupted set of institutional practices precedes those downstream harms. Even if purged agencies somehow delivered efficient service, the relation among offices would still be corrupt, qua unjustifiable on office accountability standards.

Why this matters for liberal democracy

Schedule F and the IG purge are more than controversial partisan maneuvers; they are live demonstrations of how political corruption can infiltrate the core of government not through hidden bribes but through open re‑engineering of roles. When officeholders cease to justify power in public‑mandate terms, the raison d’être of democratic institutions dissolves into strategic rule. A liberal democracy relies on a network of offices whose occupants can demand and receive such justification; without it, public institutions become vessels for whatever strategic agenda happens to prevail in the executive suite. That is the trajectory these two policies trace.

Recognizing them as instances of political corruption—rather than merely hard‑fought policy—orients criticism away from personalities toward institutional structures of accountability. The question that comes into focus is not merely whether a president may pursue conservative goals, but whether he may do so by disabling the relational checks that define public office. A public ethics of office accountability offers the conceptual and normative toolkit to answer a qualified “no:” any such disabling is corrupt to the extent that it re‑writes the office’s mandate without an appropriate justification. Even more dramatically, it dismantles the mechanism and culture of office accountability that are the very premise for opposing political corruption.

Restoring office accountability

What, then, counts as an appropriate response to such a systemically corrupt institutional configuration? Tighter external regulation by judicial means alone can hardly cure such corruption. An ethics of office accountability stresses the importance of answerability practices to re‑activate mutual scrutiny inside the institution (PC: 125‑26; 141‑43). Congressional notice‑and‑wait rules for firing IGs embody precisely such an answerability device: they should force the executive to articulate a public‑spirited rationale, inviting contestation. Trump’s purge bypassed that dialogical safeguard, illustrating how political corruption advances by silencing institutional deliberative reflective practices of reason-giving. Likewise, Schedule F suppresses peer review of hiring choices, converting discretionary space—normally a zone for professional judgment—into a conduit for partisan loyalty.

The antidote is to restore venues where officeholders can (and must!) engage in such practices. Legislators can insist on notice periods and hearings for IG removals; civil‑service commissions can promulgate transparent criteria for any re‑classification of positions; courts can demand reason‑giving when agencies dismiss career staff. Beyond legal controls, professional associations and internal ethics committees can cultivate an institutional culture where each official expects to be asked, and is ready to explain, how a chosen course is aligned with their mandate and serves the institution’s raison d’être.

Emanuela Ceva is Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the University of Geneva. She primarily works on the normative theory of institutions, focusing on democracy, corruption, institutional trust, and the political role of emotions.

Maria Paola Ferretti is a lecturer in Political Theory at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. Her interests include public justification, theories of justice, and the ethics of public politics, particularly risk management and corruption.

Together, they have recently published the book Political Corruption. The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed on The Public Ethics Blog are solely those of the post author(s) and not The Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, Stockholm University, the Wallenberg Foundation, or the staff of those organisations.