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STAT+: Trump fired the top HHS watchdog. She says the future of health care oversight is grim if partisanship wins out
Before Trump fired her, Christi Grimm's office had recovered $30 billion for taxpayers.
Christi Grimm was driving to a pottery class with her young daughter on Jan. 25 when she got a call from a colleague, who told Grimm she should probably pull over. The news: President Trump had fired her.
Grimm was the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services and was axed as part of Trump’s purge of federal watchdogs. Word of the firing quickly spread across the country — starting in the pottery class. Her daughter promptly told her classmates, “President Trump just fired my mom,” Grimm recalled.
Since then, Grimm and seven other inspector generals have sued Trump and his cabinet officials, alleging the terminations were illegal. She views her firing not just as a violation of law, but as a litmus test of whether the executive branch chooses partisan loyalists or independent guardians to root out fraud, waste, and abuse that exist within Medicare, Medicaid, and other health care programs. Trump has shown he prefers the former: His nominee to replace Grimm is Thomas March Bell, a Republican attorney who has investigated Planned Parenthood.
