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FBI Director Christopher Wray told Bureau workers on December 12 that he will resign at the end of President Biden’s term.
President-elect Trump has tried to bully several senior officials who have term appointments into leaving office early so that he can name their replacements. They include the FBI director, the IRS commissioner, and the chair of the Federal Reserve.
Appointments that are not coterminous with the presidency are one of our important checks and balances, especially against a would-be dictator like Trump. Most key regulatory commissions, by long-standing statutory law, have term appointees, though in many cases the president gets to appoint or designate the chairman.
One term appointee, FBI Director Christopher Wray, told Bureau workers on December 12 that he will resign at the end of President Biden’s term, as Trump requested. “In my view,” he said at a Bureau town meeting, “this is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”
This has it exactly backwards. Congress deliberately gave the FBI director a ten-year term to insulate the Bureau from politics. This did not prevent Wray’s predecessor, James Comey (who was appointed by Obama), from meddling in the 2016 election at Hillary Clinton’s expense.
Wray, a Brahmin Republican lawyer appointed by Trump in 2017, has been relatively independent. He infuriated Trump by cooperating with investigations of Trump’s wrongdoing, and testified before the Senate that the events of January 6, 2021, were a case of “domestic terrorism.”
Trump’s choice to succeed Wray, Kash Patel, is the worst of the worst; if confirmed, he will use the FBI for partisan retribution. Wray’s term has three more years to run. It would not have been fun, but if he cared about the Bureau and the Constitution, he had a duty to stay on the job.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell is another Trump target. Despite Trump’s demand that he step aside, Powell, whose fixed term expires in mid-2026, has made it clear that he is not going anywhere. After Powell made that definitive statement, Trump backtracked, saying he did not plan to remove the Fed chair.
We have not exactly been fans of Powell. He kept interest rates too high for too long, but he will not be Trump’s pawn. It’s painful to view the unaccountable and Wall Street–oriented Fed as a bulwark of democracy, but that’s what things have come to. (In Trump’s first term, the generals turned out to be defenders of democracy.)
The IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, has a five-year term that expires in 2027, but the law provides that he can be removed by the president. Trump has already named his choice for IRS commissioner, former Missouri Congressman Billy Long. Since leaving office, Long’s main activity has been running a consulting firm advising businesses on how to take advantage of the COVID-era Employee Retention Credit, which is still available in some cases. Trump’s nod to Long is a case of one grifter helping another.
The IRS is also crucial because of the risk of weaponization. As I’ve written, the IRS could be used to go after the tax exemptions of the progressive ecosystem, whose organizations are substantially organized as 501(c)(3)s.
Speaking at the University of Texas Taxation Conference on December 5, Werfel ducked a question about Billy Long. “I think the folks that should comment on them are the incoming administration, the transition team, and as appropriate, the nominees themselves,” he said.
Werfel implied that he might stay on as IRS commissioner for at least a few months, adding that he would stay “laser focused” on IRS readiness for the start of the next filing season in early 2025. One could imagine a tacit deal where Werfel stays a few months, Trump holds off trying to push him out, and then he steps aside. He should try to stay as long as possible.
You can contrast how some term appointees are meekly going out with Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Because of a 2020 Supreme Court ruling, the CFPB director can be fired at will on day one of a new administration, and Chopra almost certainly will be. But that hasn’t stopped him from a flurry of lawsuits against big banks, Walmart, and Rocket Mortgage, to name a few, along with creating a new credit card comparison shopping tool and issuing guidance on debt collector harassment. He’s hitting the tape strong, forcing Trump to fire him while he takes popular actions protecting consumers.
My first article for a national magazine was on the failed efforts of Richard Nixon to politicize the IRS, both to spy on tax returns and to punish enemies. That effort failed because of the integrity of two Republican IRS commissioners. It became an article in Nixon’s impeachment.
More than ever, we need that kind of integrity and grit now.
