Good Government Groups to Senate: Oppose OSC nominee Paul Ingrassia

Dear Senator:

We, the undersigned organizations, urge you to oppose the nomination of Paul Ingrassia to the position of special counsel at the Office of Special Counsel (OSC).

OSC is an independent federal agency whose mission is to “safeguard the merit system by protecting federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices (PPPs), especially reprisal for whistleblowing.”¹ It serves as a safe channel for whistleblowers to disclose evidence of corruption and wrongdoing in the executive branch. It enforces provisions of the Civil Service Reform Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, the Hatch Act, and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. The office helps protect federal employees from coerced political activity, from discrimination, from retaliation should they refuse to obey an order that violates the law, and from other prohibited practices.

OSC’s client is the federal workforce — not any administration.

By law, the special counsel must be “an attorney who, by demonstrated ability, background, training, and experience, is especially qualified to carry out the functions of the position.”² As head of OSC, the special counsel should be someone who respects federal workers, who will treat them fairly and without bias. The special counsel must be a person who will exercise their duties in a nonpartisan manner, a person of honesty and integrity who has the necessary experience to fulfill such an important role.

Paul Ingrassia is none of these.

Disrespect for Civil Servants

A fundamental role of the special counsel is to protect whistleblowers who disclose evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse of power. This is important because whistleblowers take huge risks to speak out about wrongdoing that happens behind closed doors, often facing retaliation by their agencies and losing their jobs and careers in the process.

But Ingrassia’s past comments show that he is unlikely to fulfill his duty of safeguarding the merit system: He fundamentally does not value the work or the careers of civil servants.

He has repeatedly dehumanized civil servants, referring to them as “parasites” and “bugmen” who “leech off the diminishing lifeblood of the dying Republic.”³

According to him, federal workers “overwhelmingly have no real skill sets to offer.”⁴ They are those who, “lacking any real talents, will have to find work elsewhere, using their hands to actually create things of value for maybe the first time ever.”⁵

Ingrassia’s disdain for those who work for the American people is clear: He has characterized federal workers as “out of touch with lived reality, and hence, at odds with the people whom they inevitably lord over,” and said that “[r]ather than try to take responsibility for their wastefulness, bureaucrats instead rationalize their behavior and adopt an attitude of privilege [sic] haughtiness.”⁶

It’s no wonder Ingrassia misconstrues the special counsel’s role, declaring that he would place a “priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce” (emphasis added).⁷ Rather than protecting the rights of federal workers, Ingrassia would target them instead.

Lack of Fairness

The Office of Special Counsel must be independent. With a few exceptions, the office protects federal employees at agencies across the government, ensuring that civil servants — regardless of who they work for or what kind of work they do — maintain the protections afforded to them by law.

But any notion that Ingrassia would serve civil servants fairly is belied by his prior actions, both within and outside the federal government. Moving beyond a broad disrespect for civil servants, Ingrassia has explicitly attacked entire swaths of federal employees with whom he disagrees.

According to former colleagues, during his very brief stint at the Department of Justice, Ingrassia stated that anyone who worked under former attorneys general Merrick Garland or Bill Barr is unqualified to work for the current Trump administration.⁸

He has advocated using security clearances as a tool for retaliation, writing after the 2024 election that the “President-elect should immediately revoke the security clearances of any person working in the private sector who was appointed by Presidents Biden or Obama and a curated list of others.”⁹

Days after President Trump’s inauguration, he declared, “We have DEI fumigators in every single agency in the federal government, working to root out incompetence, corruption, and disloyalty.”¹⁰

Later, while working as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, he retweeted a post saying 50% of Department of Education staffers would be laid off, adding that the department was “on its last legs! Glorious to see!”¹¹

Given these statements that encourage the very practices against which the OSC is required to protect, it is farcical to expect Ingrassia to use OSC’s authority to enforce federal workers’ job protections fairly and equally across the federal government.

Hyperpartisan

Another reason the special counsel must remain independent is that the office is responsible for shielding nonpartisan career experts from partisan political interference and investigating wrongdoing by political appointees. It’s imperative, therefore, that a special counsel be nonpartisan to ensure the independence and integrity of their work.

But Ingrassia cannot be trusted to serve in a nonpartisan way, because he does not believe in a nonpartisan civil service. Following President Trump’s reelection in November, he wrote, “The idea that civil servants are ‘apolitical’ has always been hogwash, a myth propounded by these very same people who never want to be held responsible for anything.”¹²

Ingrassia has supported policy change that would increase politicization of the civil service, especially Schedule F (which has been renamed Schedule Policy/Career). Ingrassia said this policy, which would strip tens of thousands of career civil servants of due process protections, is crucial to “make any bureaucrat that deviates from the agenda of the President fireable.”¹³

Ingrassia would cede OSC’s independence and use its authority to push the president’s political agenda. We know he would do this because he said he believes that only the president and vice president, “being the only two democratically elected and deliberative officers in the whole Executive Branch – should have a say over the bureaucracy which helps the President implement and enforce his agenda.”¹⁴

It is hard to imagine what role he would play at OSC if not to act as a rubber stamp for the White House.

Questions of Character

Finally, the special counsel must display honesty and integrity.

But Ingrassia has shown he lacks good judgment. He has long trafficked in a seemingly endless array of fringe and debunked conspiracy theories, including election denialism,¹⁵ and shared a Twitter post calling for President Trump to declare martial law to overturn the 2020 election.

Ingrassia has also publicly touted less common conspiracy theories. In 2023, he tweeted that “In a proper country, any public building now flying the Ukraine flag would be forced to replace it with the confederate battle flag.”¹⁷ A week after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, he tweeted that “Israel/Palestine, much like Ukraine before it, and BLM before that, and covid/vaccine before that, was yet another psyop.”¹⁸

Many of the conspiracy theories uplifted by Ingrassia are inherently discriminatory: He publicly questioned former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s eligibility for the presidency, President Barack Obama’s birthplace and sexual orientation, and former First Lady Michelle Obama’s gender.¹⁹

Ingrassia also has a history of making explicitly racist statements. He has declared that “Exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage.”²⁰ And he has advocated to “Make the descendants of slaves pay reparations to the descendants of slave owners.”²¹ Rhetoric like this exposes the profound lack of character and judgment Ingrassia would bring to OSC.

Inexperienced

According to POGO’s review, the previous four special counsels — appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents — had on average approximately 23 years of career legal experience before serving as special counsel.

Ingrassia has been a licensed attorney for less than one year.²²

In January 2025, Ingrassia was assigned as the White House Liaison to the Department of Justice. He lasted one month before clashing with DOJ chief of staff Chad Mizelle and being transferred to the Department of Homeland Security.²³ While at DOJ, he urged the Justice Department to hire based on “exceptional loyalty” to the president rather than merit, saying that hiring for personal loyalty was a top priority for him.²⁴

Conclusion

The Office of Special Counsel helps ensure that civil servants are loyal first and foremost to the Constitution and rule of law, that they can do their jobs without undue political influence, that they can safely speak out about wrongdoing, and that they serve the public fairly, and protects them from a politicized federal civil service.

Civil servants deserve a special counsel who takes this role seriously, who will serve independently, and who will use their authority to protect federal workers and to hold individuals and agencies accountable when they abuse their power.

Paul Ingrassia is a demonstrably unserious nominee. He is unqualified and unfit to serve as special counsel. We implore you to oppose his nomination.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have questions or concerns, please contact Joe Spielberger ([email protected]).