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The Trump administration has installed a former White House official and author of the Project 2025 Republican policy playbook at what is supposed to be an independent internal watchdog at the Interior Department, a House Democrat says.
Rep. Jared Huffman (Calif.), the ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee, released a statement this week saying Dennis Kirk was placed in the inspector general’s office at the department, which oversees the nation’s public lands and national monuments.
“Dennis Kirk is a fake and fraudulent watchdog. Everyone should have their eyes wide open. Each and every thing this political puppet does will be in service of Donald Trump,” Huffman said.
John Bell, a spokesperson for the Office of the Inspector General at the Interior Department, declined to comment.
The Hill also attempted to email Kirk at the inspector general’s office and did not immediately receive a reply. However, the email to Kirk did appear to go through, unlike a test email sent by The Hill to a fake address at the same domain, which bounced back.
Kirk served in the White House Office of Personnel Management during the first Trump administration. He’s also one of the authors of a Project 2025 chapter on the federal bureaucracy.
This is apparently not his first time being installed at an inspector general’s office. The Washington Post reported that then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard placed Kirk at the watchdog in charge of overseeing her work last year.
Meanwhile, Mark Greenblatt, a former inspector general at Interior, called the appointment unprecedented and a threat to the office’s independence and investigations.
“It’s extremely out of the ordinary,” Greenblatt, who was ousted during a purge of inspectors general last year, told The Hill.
He said that in his approximately 20-year career, “the only time I’ve heard of anything like this is this same guy in the Intelligence Community IG [inspector general] a year ago.”
In a previous statement on the apparent appointment, Greenblatt said the appointment “raises serious questions about the independence of one of the federal government’s most important accountability institutions.”
Greenblatt, who was actually appointed to be the inspector general by President Trump in 2019, warned that having a political staffer at the office could also compromise the identity of whistleblowers who come forward to report malfeasance.
“You have whistleblowers who come to the Office of Inspector General to make complaints, including complaints about senior political officials and sensitive political programs, and their names and identities are supposed to be kept confidential,” he told The Hill. “But if you have an administration mole in the office, all of a sudden, does that information become fair game to the administration?”
It’s not entirely clear who placed Kirk at the Interior Department’s watchdog, and spokespeople for the broader department did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment. The White House also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But the appointment comes as Interior faces increasing scrutiny over Trump projects in Washington, D.C., particularly the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Recent reports indicate that contracts for work on the pool were issued through an atypical no-bid process.
Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have accused “vandals” of damaging the Reflecting Pool, but U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro in the past week moved to drop charges against people accused of damaging the pool, instead citing a “botched” installation of a coating at the site.
This week, Senate Democrats wrote to the inspector general’s office requesting a probe into the Reflecting Pool saga.
Add as preferred source on Google Tags Dennis Kirk Donald Trump Doug Burgum House Natural Resources Committee Interior Department Jared Huffman Jeanine Pirro Office of the Inspector General Project 2025 Rep. Jared Huffman Trump administrationCopyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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