By CHARLIE SAVAGE NYTimes News Service
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The Trump administration on Monday ordered former staff members for as many as 17 fired inspectors general to immediately arrange for the return of work laptops, phones, parking decals and ID cards — even as questions remained over whether President Donald Trump broke the law in dismissing independent watchdogs.

Some of the fired officials were seeking to raise alarms about what had happened. Among them was Mark Greenblatt, whom Trump had appointed as the inspector general of the Interior Department five years ago and who had led an interagency council of the watchdog officials until the new year.

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“This raises an existential threat with respect to the primary independent oversight function in the federal government,” Greenblatt said in an interview. “We have preserved the independence of inspectors general by making them not swing with every change in political party.”

He warned that the credibility of the inspectors general would be at issue if Trump put in “lackeys that are rubber-stamping his programs and exonerating allegations for his own people willy-nilly.” Doing so would give the next Democratic president incentive to fire them all, too, setting off “a never-ending cycle of politicization.”

Aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump defended the purge. “Some people thought that some were unfair or some were not doing the job,” he said, falsely claiming that a mass removal of inspectors general was “a very standard thing to do.”

That is not true. While it is the case that after Congress enacted the Inspector General Act in 1978 and President Ronald Reagan removed all of those he inherited from President Jimmy Carter in 1981, he later rehired some of them. And since then, the norm has been that they remain in place when new presidents take office, underscoring their role as nonpartisan officials.

Even as word began to seep out late Friday and into the weekend that the White House had tersely dismissed officials, citing its “changing priorities,” it had not released a comprehensive list of who had been fired, leading to confusion about the extent of the purge.

In an interview Monday, Hannibal Ware, who goes by Mike and who took over as chair of the interagency council in January and was among those fired, said the dismissals he knew of extended to 17 officials covering 18 agencies. He had held the watchdog role for two agencies, one of which was in an acting capacity.

The agencies were, he said, the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.

They also included, he said, a special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction and the internal watchdogs at the Environmental Protection Agency, the White House’s Office of Personnel Management and Ware’s own two agencies, the Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.

But, underscoring the confusion, at least one of those inspectors, Krista A. Boyd of the Office of Personnel Management, found herself locked out of the system even though she had not received an email informing her that she was fired, according to people familiar with the matter. The inspector general community is assuming that she is terminated, too.

In response to the purge, Ware, in a letter to the White House late Friday, suggested that the firings were illegal because they violated a law that requires giving Congress 30 days’ advance notice with the reason for any removal of an inspector general.

He said Monday that even though he was not removed in accordance with the law, he was effectively fired given that he no longer had access to the building and computer systems.

Greenblatt, for his part, said he had decided against going to the office Monday, even to retrieve his personal items from his desk, because he did not want to provoke a security incident.