Donald Trump spent four years twisting the federal government to his own purposes, and nowhere was that more evident than in the Department of Justice. The urgency of cleaning house at Justice cannot be overstated—but Attorney General Merrick Garland doesn’t seem to feel that urgency, to the increasing concern of some Democrats.

In recent weeks we’ve learned that the Trump Justice Department secretly subpoenaed records of Democratic members of Congress and of reporters at three media outlets. Trump also pressured top officials to help him overturn his election loss. And those are just the headline-grabbing abuses.

The Revolving Door Project has spent months warning of ways Trump could have politicized the federal bureaucracy, where, for all Trump’s disdain of George W. Bush, the Bush administration provided a road map to increasing the power of political appointees and politicizing the hiring of career civil servants. At the Justice Department, Team Trump ultimately got seven political appointees hired to career civil service positions.

The house needs cleaning. But Garland isn’t rushing to do that. In fact, it’s worse.

Under Garland, the Justice Department has followed the policy instituted under William Barr of helping Trump fend off a defamation lawsuit stemming from Trump’s denials of writer E. Jean Carroll’s rape allegation. That’s the tip of the iceberg as Garland apparently tries to show his independence from partisan concerns by … continuing the partisan agenda of his predecessors. “Garland has quietly emerged as Donald Trump’s unwitting hatchet man, doing almost everything in his power to protect the lawless former president’s legacy,” the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser and Max Moran recently wrote at The New Republic. 

The list of such actions is long: “He has committed the DOJ to defending a Trump-era policy slashing the number of legal immigrants who qualify for green cards. He’s hiring dozens of new immigration court judges who received their initial offers during the Trump era, and codified Trump-era rules restricting immigrants’ options to prevent their own deportations,” Hauser and Moran wrote. Additionally, “Meanwhile, Garland’s DOJ is actively defending a new oil project in Alaska that was cleared under Trump’s shams of environmental tests and may generate new oil for 30 years. In its filing, the DOJ explicitly said that the Trump administration adequately considered the new site’s effect on wildlife and greenhouse gas emissions. Garland is also maintaining support for a new oil pipeline in New Jersey and isn’t rescinding Trump-era briefs that made it harder for states to sue Big Oil over downplaying the risks of climate change.” (There’s more. Read that whole article.)

Now, congressional Democrats are starting to sound the alarm, and starting to pressure Garland.

“I spoke with [Garland] yesterday and urged that we do a broader review than just the issues affecting the committee and the press, but the entire degree to which the department leadership was politicized by his predecessor,” Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the Democrats whose records were subpoenaed by Trump, said on Tuesday. “And I’m confident that he will.”

Others sound less confident.

”I want to give [Garland] the benefit of the doubt. He comes out of the judiciary and may not have all that great situational awareness about the malevolent political forces around him,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. “He’s also still filling out his team. So I’m willing to be patient for a bit.”

“But,” Whitehouse added, “if it doesn’t get better, as time moves on, I’m going to get pretty impatient.”

Yeah, maybe get impatient now. About both investigations of Team Trump’s wrongdoing and the priorities that will move the country forward.

“The Department of Justice has a very long to-do list,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told The Daily Beast. “I would strongly urge the Department to prioritize the civil rights work, voting protection, antitrust, and not the initiatives begun during the Trump era that undermine justice in this country.”

And that work needs to be started, Warren noted, with the recognition that “limited time, limited resources, mean that this Justice department needs to be focused on the protection of our democracy and our economy, not on the protection of Donald Trump.”

An independent Justice Department is a great thing. But right now, Garland seems to be more intent on showing that it’s independent of the current presidency than the previous one. It’s past time for that to change.