President Trump fired me. Now it will be easier for the government to spy on Americans | Travis LeBlanc

Donald Trump fired me on Monday from my job as a member of the bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board – a job he nominated me for twice. Yes, I am a Democrat. He also fired every other board member who is not a registered Republican. While most Americans have never heard of our board, which oversees national security agencies such as the CIA, NSA and FBI, we should all be concerned about the undermining of an oversight agency designed by Congress to ensure that government surveillance does not infringe our privacy and civil liberties.

The board I served on was created to make sure that independent bipartisan subject matter experts – such as myself and my fellow board members – could keep a close watch on the use of new national security powers presidents were given to surveil Americans after 9/11. Our job was to look for abuses that threatened Americans’ privacy and freedom.

Congress designed the board as an “independent agency” to keep it insulated from day-to-day politics. Members of the board must be Senate confirmed and are appointed to six-year terms so that they serve by law and design across two administrations. At least two of the five members must not be from the president’s political party, and in selecting those members the law requires that the president consult with the opposition party. That design helps to ensure that potential surveillance abuses – abuses that might be targeted at the opposition and not otherwise be known to Congress, the courts or the American public – are more difficult to hide behind invocations of national security and executive privilege.

Despite Congress’s attempt to insulate the board from politics, I and other board members were fired before the end of our terms with no explanation. Our firings were clearly partisan, but Americans should not be fooled into thinking that board members have partisan agendas. I was nominated for my seat two times by Trump in his first term and confirmed by a Republican Senate. At a time when Democrats and Republicans were fleeing the federal government, I dutifully took up Trump’s call to serve in his first administration.

My top priority while at the board was oversight of the FBI – a concern that I am confident the president shares. And since taking office, I have been criticized by Joe Biden’s National Security Council and earned praise from Freedom caucus Republicans for proposing reforms to ensure that federal surveillance activities are not being abused to spy on American citizens.

The result of these historically unprecedented firings at our agency is that a board intentionally designed by Congress to be staffed on a bipartisan basis across administrations is now exclusively staffed by a single Republican. That Republican has previously aligned herself with Merrick Garland and the Biden administration in defending warrantless surveillance by the FBI on average Americans – a practice that a federal court in New York ruled unconstitutional last week. And worse, the board (which requires a quorum of three members to do anything) will no longer engage in any oversight of presidential surveillance of American citizens. In other words, by firing us, the president has extinguished independent oversight of surveillance activities of the exact kind that plagued Trump and Carter Page in past years.

The same story is being repeated throughout the executive branch. Trump has fired many of the inspector generals whose job is to prevent government waste, fraud and abuse. He’s fired the heads of other independent agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, with many others likely to follow. And he’s undertaking a swift purge of the civil service to get rid of anyone not perceived as sufficiently loyal.

These partisan witch hunts and firings need to stop. Congress creates independent agencies and insulates civil servants from partisan firings for a reason. They provide critical non-partisan expertise to Congress, the president and the American people on a wide range of critical issues from privacy, to securities regulation, to monetary policy, to transportation safety, to protecting American consumers from corporate abuses, to the storage of radioactive materials. If this week’s actions by the president become the new normal – and partisanship overrides Congress’s design and becomes the only criteria for holding a position in a federal agency – then our financial markets will be more volatile, our consumer products more hazardous, our skies and railroads more dangerous, and our civil liberties and constitutional rights less secure.