Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

President Biden is trying to shake a Trump hangover in the federal government by acting to remove some holdovers and install his own appointees, but a quiet push to salt federal agencies with Trump loyalists is complicating the new president’s effort to turn the page.

he Biden team, showing a willingness to cut tenures short, moved quickly last week to dump several high-profile, Senate-confirmed Trump appointees whose terms extended beyond Inauguration Day — in some cases by several years.

They include the surgeon general, the National Labor Relations Board’s powerful general counsel, and the heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

But other, lower-profile Trump loyalists, some of whom helped carry out his administration’s most controversial policies, are now scattered throughout Biden’s government in permanent, senior positions. And identifying them, let alone dislodging them, could be difficult for the new leadership.

The Jan. 16 appointment of Michael Ellis, a former GOP operative who served in the Trump White House, as the National Security Agency’s top lawyer caused such a furor that Biden’s team placed him on paid leave within hours of taking office.

And in the former president’s final months and weeks, dozens of other political appointees had their status similarly converted to permanent civil service roles that will allow them to stay in government for years to come. These new career officials are protected from partisan removal unless the new administration discovers that they got their jobs illegally — without competition and because of their political affiliation.

As Biden tries to reset the government to match his priorities, Democrats fear the Trump holdovers, who served in partisan roles, could undermine the new administration as they move into the civil service, which is supposed to operate free of partisanship.

The practice of shifting employees from appointee to career status, informally called burrowing, occurs at the end of every presidency — and it is controversial. Trump aides and their GOP allies in Congress, for example, threatened at the start of Trump’s term to remove any Obama-era political appointees who had been replanted in the civil service, and dozens were, records show.

But the just-departed president is on track to exceed the number of Democrats the Obama administration rewarded with permanent roles. In his final year, Obama moved 29 political appointees into career jobs. As of November, Trump had installed almost that many, 26, in the first 10 months of 2020, according to data provided to Congress by the Office of Personnel Management.

Nine more requests await review by personnel officials. More are expected. Congress has not received data covering December and the first 20 days of January, when outgoing administrations tend to move quickly to reward appointees who want to stay in government.

Burrowing is frowned upon by good-government groups — and by members of the party that is out of power — even when it is carried out legally, which means the appointee competed for the position and was the top candidate on the basis of merit and work experience, with no nod to political affiliation or loyalty.

The hiring of a political appointee for a career job must be scrutinized by the federal personnel office for five years after the person left the partisan job.

Such conversions also can violate civil service laws, as occurred during the George W. Bush administration, when a young Justice Department lawyer from the Republican National Committee, Monica Goodling, was found to have broken the law by using politics to guide hiring decisions for a range of critical jobs.

Goodling was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony, and was reprimanded by the Virginia Bar. She acknowledged during a House hearing that she “crossed the line” and broke civil service hiring rules.

“There’s a great irony here,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who leads a House oversight panel on federal government operations, referring to Trump’s efforts to place his appointees in government. “The crowd that didn’t believe in government and called its agencies the deep state now wants to work for them.”

onnolly has asked the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s research arm, to tally all of Trump’s conversions over four years.

A 48 percent raise
Many of the new hires were not announced by their agencies, which may have presented a challenge for Biden’s transition teams to discover them.

“The incoming Biden-Harris administration is keenly aware of last minute efforts by the outgoing administration to convert political appointees into civil service positions,” a transition official said in a statement.

“We anticipate learning more in the weeks ahead as our work to restore trust and accountability across the federal government begins, including reviewing personnel actions during the Trump administration,” the official said.

Trump partisans now work in Biden’s government at a range of agencies, including the Justice Department, Homeland Security and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Many are serving in senior executive roles, the highest echelon of career leaders. They work as assistant U.S. attorneys, general counsel, intelligence leaders, immigration judges.

Some got significant raises when they joined the permanent bureaucracy. Jordan Von Bokern, who clerked for Amy Coney Barrett when she was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, went in April from counsel in Justice’s Office of Legal Policy, making $93,642, to a career trial attorney in the agency’s civil division making $109,366, records show. Von Bokern did not return a call seeking comment.

And when Jonathan Midgett served as executive assistant at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission starting in 2017, he made $86,021. Now, as the commissioner’s consumer ombudsman as of April, he’s earning $127,596 — an increase of 48 percent.

At the Energy Department, there’s Brandon Middleton, a lawyer who fought the Endangered Species Act for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation before joining the staff of then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). When he was Trump’s first attorney general, Sessions hired Middleton to work in the Justice Department’s environmental division. Then Middleton held a deputy solicitor job at the Interior Department before his permanent appointment as Energy’s chief counsel in the office that manages contracts for cleaning up toxic waste. He got a $10,000 raise to $172,508, records show.

“If I was at Energy, I would be looking at Mr. Middleton very warily,” said Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.

Middleton declined to comment.

In June, then-Attorney General William P. Barr hired Tracy Short as the chief immigration judge at Justice, after he served three years in a political role as senior adviser and legal adviser to the leadership at Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Homeland Security. ICE was responsible for carrying out Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, which Biden is moving to reverse. Short also got a $10,000 raise, to $185,368.

Short did not return a call seeking comment.

About that time, Lawrence Connell, a senior executive who was chief of staff in the Veterans Health Administration, a political appointment with a $179,700 salary, was hired to a permanent job leading VA’s health-care system in Rhode Island, which provides care to more than 35,000 veterans. His new salary is $190,400. Connell did not respond to an email seeking comment.

These hires were approved by the Office of Personnel Management, which reviews requests from federal agencies. Some requests are rejected, when personnel experts conclude that political considerations played a role. The OPM declined 14 of the Trump administration’s requests during the first 11 months of 2020, compared with 10 during the final year of Obama’s second term, data shows.

Recently denied conversions include an appointee in the Office of Administration at Housing and Urban Development, hired in 2017 as a senior executive. This person, whose name was withheld from the data, applied to be senior adviser for public affairs.

“We could not conclude appointment was free of political influence and complied with merit system principles and applicable civil service laws and regulations,” the reviewing official wrote.

Ellis’s hiring at the NSA was not made available to the personnel agency, which recently told Democrats in Congress that it does not review requests from the intelligence community, sealing those decisions off from the public and Congress.

Ellis is on leave pending an inquiry by the Pentagon inspector general into the circumstances of his selection. NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone put Ellis on paid administrative leave four days after then-acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller was ordered by the outgoing administration to install Ellis in the job.

But if Ellis and the others who burrowed in were hired properly, firing them outright will be hard for Biden to accomplish. At most agencies, career officials serve a year on probation — that period is two years at the Defense Department — during which they can be fired without cause. If some of the Trump loyalists already have made it through probation, they can be reassigned to other roles or given little to do. Like all career employees, they have rights to due process, experts said.

Resignations requested

Biden has more control over political appointees. He has asked for the resignation of Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams, who had been nominated by Trump in 2017 to a four-year term set to expire in September. The new president has moved to install new leadership at health agencies that will be crucial to fighting the coronavirus pandemic, after accusing the Trump team of muzzling federal scientists and pursuing a political agenda at the cost of public health and lives.

In other cases, Biden has sought to get rid of people installed by Trump in what the new president considers bad faith.

For example, Biden quickly forced out Michael Pack, the controversial head of the agency that oversees the Voice of America and four other networks that broadcast news to millions of people abroad, amid complaints of censorship and political interference by Pack. Biden also removed the VOA’s director and deputy director after they had been on the job only a few weeks, and the head of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting resigned.

Andrew Saul, a Trump appointee whose six-year term as Social Security commissioner officially ends in 2025, had a curious new “acting” title on a list of temporary government leaders distributed by the new White House last week. Saul announced Thursday that several high-ranking deputies on his team, who had pushed for stricter eligibility for benefits, had been replaced — with labor-friendly Democrats. The Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment about the acting title.

In firing the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, Peter Robb, Biden broke with precedent to end the tenure of a figure seen as a foe by worker advocates and labor unions.

Robb had refused to resign when asked to do so just hours into the new presidency. The request was a departure from the norm that presidents of both parties have followed to allow the general counsel to serve out their term. Robb’s term was scheduled to run another 10 months.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked last week whether Biden is pursuing a political purge.

“That’s an individual who was not carrying out ... the objectives of the NLRB, and so they were, they are, no longer in their position,” she said. “We’ll make those decisions as needed.”

We just don't seem to be able to even envision ourselves operating from a position of strength.

The Biden administration needs a game plan to deal with what will be a rolling and escalating threat from platform migration.

Since the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol in Washington, right-wing extremists on social media continue to glorify violence, draw new adherents and forge fresh plans for mayhem. This ominous activity presents an urgent threat to the security and social cohesion of the United States.

But there is another, less obvious takeaway: Experts know — or can know — an enormous amount about the nature and evolution of the threat.

Data sleuths have combed through a 70 terabyte cache of data from Parler, the now-defunct social media platform popular among the far right. Researchers have archived and mapped millions of these ethically hacked posts, wrangled by an anonymous, purportedly Austria-based hacker. The haul — potentially bigger than the WikiLeaks data dump of the Afghan War logs and the Democratic National Committee leak, combined — includes valuable evidence and planning of further attacks, mixed in with the private data of individuals who committed no crimes (along with quite a bit of pornography). The early takeaways are terrifying: According to at least one preliminary analysis, the frequency of hashtags on Parler referencing hanging or killing duly elected members of Congress more than doubled after the November elections.

Until the nation reckons with the self-inflicted wounds stemming from an under-regulated, unreformed social media information architecture, President Biden’s calls for healing and national unity won’t produce substantial, lasting results. The new administration needs a long-term plan to confront the escalating threat, as far-right insurgents migrate from one platform to the next.

The Parler hack is the place to start. It indicates that moderation of violent, racist, anti-democratic content will increasingly lead to migration of that same hateful content. For instance, the deplatforming of Parler triggered a virtual stampede to similar forums like Gab and Rumble. Analysts have already documented Parler groups re-forming and spreading evermore hateful content on Telegram and a host of smaller platforms.

As the Parler case study also showed, deplatforming also disappears valuable data. But extremists don’t just vanish — they tumble into “smaller and smaller rabbit holes,” in the words of researcher Peter Singer. Those rabbit holes make up a large, growing and uncontrollable far-right media universe.

Since a number of large tech companies stopped supporting Parler, it was resurrected in a new form — a landing page that promised a full return — on the same web hosting service that provides a platform for The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi message board. The move suggests that even if big tech giants get rid of toxic content, smaller companies will step in as safe havens.

That could change. There are mounting calls in Congress for investigations into the role played by Parler and other social media platforms in the siege in Washington. Inaction risks the very real possibility that countries like Russia may offer themselves as a web hosting alternative for violent anti-democratic factions inside the United States: Parler has reportedly engaged in business dealings with Russian-owned tech firms.

Deplatforming, then, must be coupled with better, faster and more comprehensive data collection and analysis. Facebook, Twitter and others must also be more transparent about preserving evidence of account takedowns, so disinformation researchers can put the pieces together for a public thirsty for accountability from Silicon Valley.

While the tech industry must take more assertive action on moderation, policymakers must also acknowledge that the self-policing model adopted by Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon and others is broken. All sides would be better served by the adoption — and vigorous enforcement — of legal norms for online content moderation, incitement and expectations of privacy.

In the long run, this shift will also help Silicon Valley firms manage competing expectations from major global markets, which have often instituted much more aggressive government oversight. The question for the United States is whether the future of the internet runs toward Europe’s community-oriented version or Beijing’s authoritarian-empowerment model.

The threats to national security posed by this information disorder demand more open collaboration between policymakers, the tech industry and the research community. Together, they must accept the fact that the internet ecosystem of right-wing extremism is vast, and that the risk of its exponential expansion on the dark web is substantial.

Nearly a decade ago, former C.I.A. director Leon Panetta’s warning of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor” evoked images of a Russian, Chinese or Al Qaeda-led attack on American infrastructure. But few imagined that American democracy could be taken out by what is effectively a virtual suicide bomb, driven by millions of U.S. citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.

The future of American democracy depends on our defusing that bomb — together.

I think the answer is this:

Quote:

Because in two or four years, we’ll need it?

I would put "might" instead of "will". Hopefully, we will be able to hold to our majorities and add to them.

I don't think it is a good idea because it just opens a Pandora's box, like "since the "dems" did this, now that we have power we will do this."

Someone is going nuts with the thumbs feature.

What is going on with the thumbs feature. Why so many down votes all of a sudden?

And in another thread, I am not able to quote anyone. It simply will not allow a quote...or reply via quote. Is something up?

WASHINGTON — When Representative Scott Perry joined his colleagues in a monthslong campaign to undermine the results of the presidential election, promoting “Stop the Steal” events and supporting an attempt to overturn millions of legally cast votes, he often took a back seat to higher-profile loyalists in President Donald J. Trump’s orbit.

But Mr. Perry, an outspoken Pennsylvania Republican, played a significant role in the crisis that played out at the top of the Justice Department this month, when Mr. Trump considered firing the acting attorney general and backed down only after top department officials threatened to resign en masse.

It was Mr. Perry, a member of the hard-line Freedom Caucus, who first made Mr. Trump aware that a relatively obscure Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, the acting chief of the civil division, was sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s view that the election had been stolen, according to former administration officials who spoke with Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump.

Mr. Perry introduced the president to Mr. Clark, whose openness to conspiracy theories about election fraud presented Mr. Trump with a welcome change from the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who stood by the results of the election and had repeatedly resisted the president’s efforts to undo them.