As their numbers increased in the four decades since, inspectors general have played that role in bureaucracies as vast as the Pentagon and as tiny as the Denali Commission, charged with developing infrastructure in Alaska. It was an inspector general who in 2003 discovered that the C.I.A. was using unauthorized techniques to torture detainees and an inspector general who brought to light billions of dollars wasted in reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.
But President Trump has made clear that he has little use for this kind of independent oversight, which he sees as yet another form of resistance from the so-called Deep State. “I think we’ve been treated very unfairly by inspector generals,” he said this week.
And now he has launched a full-fledged — and at moments quite innovative — attack on the ability of inspectors general to investigate his administration.
Mr. Trump’s effort began last month with a sudden flurry of Friday-night firings and demotions. It has escalated with an attempt to bypass legal requirements that he give reasons to Congress 30 days before removing an inspector general. He has forged new ground by replacing them with political appointees who hold on to their old jobs, keeping them under the control of the cabinet secretaries they are supposed to be policing.
The president’s moves have hardly been subtle. When Steve A. Linick, the State Department’s inspector general, was fired last Friday, he was immediately locked out of his office and his email. His replacement is an associate of Vice President Mike Pence’s and remains in a politically appointed post that is subordinate to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who complained this week that Mr. Linick was not willing to live up to the secretary’s slogan, “one team, one mission.”
The message to the 74 inspectors general scattered around the government was unmistakable: If they unearth damaging information, especially in these crucial months before a presidential election, they are inviting retaliation.
“Trump is replacing independent inspectors general with unqualified political allies, which is inconsistent with statutory requirements,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written about the watchdog system. “The bottom line is he is removing independent officials who protect the public and help ensure the law is followed.”
When President Jimmy Carter signed the 1978 law creating the inspectors general system, few imagined a president so determined to undercut it. Mr. Carter hailed the “harmony and the partnership being established between the executive and legislative branch of government to root out fraud and corruption and mismanagement.”
President Ronald Reagan replaced all Carter-appointed inspectors general when he took over in 1981, but he later rehired some of them and, since then, the tradition has held that they remain in place when a new president takes office, a sign of respect for their nonpartisan status. Presidents may remove them, but Congress required an explanation of the reasons and, in 2008, put in an additional safeguard by imposing a 30-day waiting period.
Mr. Trump, who likes to brag that he has total authority over the executive branch, has shown that he has no intention of playing by those rules. In removing Mr. Linick, for example, the president immediately stripped him of authority and told Congress he no longer had full confidence in him, but did not say why.
Mr. Trump later told reporters that he did so only because Mr. Pompeo asked him to.
“I’ve said, ‘Who appointed him,’ and they said, ‘President Obama,’” the president said. “I said, look, ‘I’ll terminate him.’ I was happy to do it,” Mr. Trump later said. Mr. Pompeo added on Wednesday that he “should have done it some time ago.”
A replacement was announced immediately: Stephen J. Akard, who also will keep his current political appointment, subordinate to Mr. Pompeo, as director of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions.
Among other things, Mr. Linick had been investigating whether Mr. Pompeo and his wife, Susan Pompeo, inappropriately used a taxpayer-paid government employee to run personal errands, and whether Mr. Pompeo acted legally last year when he circumvented Congress on selling arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
This week, Mr. Pompeo denied that he knew about what Mr. Linick was investigating other than the arms deal and said it was “patently false” that he asked Mr. Trump to fire him as retaliation. But he also refused to say what his reason was.
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