Project 2025 contributor nominated for government watchdog position

President Donald Trump on Aug. 7 nominated Dennis Kirk, a co-author of Project 2025, to serve as inspector general for the Interior Department. 

“Inspectors general must be able to investigate the administration that appointed them without fear or favor,” said former Interior IG Mark Lee Greenblatt, who was removed in a mass firing of the watchdogs at the start of Trump’s second term, in a statement. “Mr. Kirk’s political background and close ties to this administration make it impossible for him to credibly meet that fundamental test.”

While Kirk is newly nominated to lead the Interior IG office, Greenblatt and Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, last week said that Kirk had been installed as a political appointee within the Interior IG office. 

“That same office is weighing serious ethics investigations into senior officials in this administration,” Huffman said in a statement at the time. “It’s no surprise the White House suddenly wants its own man inside the one place that Trump's cronies still have reason to fear.”

Kirk co-wrote a chapter in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative presidential transitional initiative about managing the civil service. And in 2025, The Washington Post reported that former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard assigned Kirk, then one of her advisers, to a position within the IG for the intelligence community. 

Steve Katz — who served in several senior oversight roles on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch, including assisting the Clinton administration develop standards for selecting IG nominees — argued Kirk’s nomination violates rules regarding IG selections. 

Specifically, he pointed to statute that IG appointments should be made “without regard to political affiliation” and federal auditing standards developed by the Government Accountability Office that warn against “the threat that an auditor will, as a result of political, ideological, social or other convictions, take a position that is not objective.” 

“The purpose of having professional auditors — not political ones — is because Congress needs those [IG] reports to exercise its constitutional responsibilities for checks and balances,” he said.

During Trump’s first term, the president nominated Kirk to serve as chairman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, but he never received a vote on the Senate floor. Kirk also held a senior position at the Office of Personnel Management and was involved in an effort to crack down on agency diversity trainings. 

Two Senate Democrats last week requested that the Interior IG investigate the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after the U.S. Attorney's Office for D.C. dropped charges against several individuals accused of vandalizing the landmark. Instead, federal prosecutors now say that the damage to the pool’s new lining was likely caused by faulty contractor work. 

Most of the IGs who the Senate has confirmed since the start of Trump’s second term worked in his first or second administration. Additionally, the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit recently reported that the Trump administration assigned political appointees to the IG offices at the Housing and Urban Development and Labor departments for the first time in recent history.