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President Donald Trump on Thursday nominated Paul Ingrassia, a lawyer and former podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), a watchdog agency that investigates complaints of government corruption and protects whistleblowers.
The 29-year-old Cornell graduate currently serves as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, a role that traditionally involves helping coordinate policy, personnel, and political strategy between the department and the executive office.
While in Cornell Law School, Ingrassia co-hosted the political commentary podcast “Right on Point” with his sister. During the 2024 Republican presidential primary, he argued that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was not a natural-born citizen and not eligible to be president, a theory that was later shared by Trump on his Truth Social platform.
In a May 29 post on social media platform Truth Social, Trump said Ingrassia is “a highly respected attorney, writer, and constitutional scholar” who has done a “tremendous job” in his current position.
Ingrassia responded in a social media post, pledging to restore “competence and integrity to the Executive Branch” as special counsel, with a focus on “eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce.”
He also vowed to “revitalize the rule of law and fairness” in enforcement of the Hatch Act, which generally prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity while on duty or in their workplace.
Ingrassia’s appointment follows months of turbulence at the OSC. In February, Trump fired then-Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, a Biden appointee who had been confirmed to a five-year term just a year earlier. Dellinger then sued to keep his job and was temporarily reinstated under a court order.
Dellinger continued to take official actions while the legal battle played out. He launched an investigation into complaints against the Trump administration’s mass reduction of the federal workforce and argued before the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the administrative system for federal workers to appeal employment issues, that the Department of Agriculture’s firing of more than 5,000 probationary workers violated civil service protections.
The dispute concluded in March, with Dellinger dropping the lawsuit shortly after a three-judge panel for the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request from the president to halt the lower court order that had blocked his removal.
The OSC has since closed the investigations into the mass firings. In a May 9 filing with the MSPB, the office acknowledged that current federal regulations allow agencies to dismiss probationary workers “with very limited restrictions on the reasons for termination.”
The OSC has also rescinded guidelines that barred federal employees from wearing political campaign paraphernalia. Under the Biden administration, the office had reminded federal employees that they should not wear “Make America Great Again” hats or use hashtags like #MAGA or #Trump2024 in social media posts while in the workplace to avoid Hatch Act violations.
