Donald Trump is planning to put one of his most reliably right-wing goons in charge of any eventual investigation into his botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
The 80-year-old president personally oversaw the $16 million project to refurbish the D.C. landmark, only to watch as the waters turned slimy green and the pool lining split. He quickly blamed the damage on vandalism, even though his handpicked D.C. prosecutor couldn’t make any charges stick and passed the blame to Doug Burgum’s Interior Department, which was in charge of the refurb.
Now, Trump has nominated Dennis Kirk, a Project 2025 author and former adviser to Tulsi Gabbard, to run the Interior Department’s inspector general office—the watchdog that will oversee any investigation.
Kirk, whose contributions to Project 2025 as associate director included a training video and an essay on the consequences of “progressive ideology” in the federal workforce, had senior roles in the Office of Personnel Management during Trump’s first term, The Washington Post reported.
In the next administration, President Joe Biden withdrew Kirk’s nomination to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, an executive branch agency that aims “to protect Federal merit systems against partisan political” practices.
Earlier in Trump’s second term, Kirk was an adviser to then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Yet at the same time, according the Post, Kirk was working in the office of the intelligence community’s inspector general—drawing criticism from Democrats and ethics groups.
Among those attacking Kirk’s nomination to the Interior Department IG job was Rep. Jared Huffman, the House Natural Resources Committee’s highest-ranking Democrat, who called Kirk a “fake and fraudulent watchdog.”
“Each and every thing this political puppet does will be in service of Donald Trump,” he said in a statement.
He went on: “This man helped write the Project 2025 playbook for seizing control of the federal workforce. Now he sits inside the office charged with rooting out corruption at Interior, the department that manages our national parks, public lands, Tribal programs, and now under Trump, gold-slathered statues and a botched Reflecting Pool renovation.
“That same office is weighing serious ethics investigations into senior officials in this administration. 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.”
In a statement, the Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Aaron Weiss referred to the firing last year of the Interior Department’s previous inspector general, Mark Lee Greenblatt.
“Interior’s watchdog was fired, left vacant for eighteen months, and is now hosting one of the architects of Project 2025,” Weiss said. “At least five investigation requests from members of Congress are sitting in that office right now, and its integrity has been compromised. Congress cannot outsource its constitutional oversight duty to an inspector general’s office taken over by the White House.”
One investigation request Weiss mentioned concerned reporting from Politico that Interior Department staffers would routinely shred official documents and use disappearing Signal messages.
Greenblatt himself was also critical of Kirk’s nomination, telling The Hill that “the chilling effect on whistleblowers is real.”
“Who would jeopardize their careers by submitting a complaint about an administration official to an IG who is avowedly aligned with the administration?”
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the Post in a statement that “Kirk has consistently demonstrated loyalty to the rule of law during his long career within government.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Interior Department and the White House.
