The Daily Signal - In Breach of Norms, Biden Fires Trump Appointees From Government Panels

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

President Joe Biden recently purged his predecessor's appointees from government boards and commissions, in what critics call an unprecedented break with tradition. Appointees named by Donald Trump while he was president, among them former senior presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, were told bluntly by letter to resign or be terminated within a day. Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter for The Daily Wire, has extensively covered both the firings and the consequences of Biden's actions. "There are really serious problems that can happen when our long-term institutions, which are kind of designed to keep our country stable over the course of many decades, become beholden to a White House [administration] that may only be in office for four years," Rosiak says. Besides advisory boards for the various military academies, the Trump appointees targeted by Biden include the Equal Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Arctic Research Commission, and the National Board for Education Sciences, Rosiak reported. Normally, members of such panels carry over for the remainder of their terms when a new president from either major party takes office. Rosiak joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss his reporting and the implications of Biden's departure from tradition and precedent. We also cover these stories: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visits the Texas border again. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., calls on Democratic leaders to ignore the Senate parliamentarian's ruling and push on with including immigration policies in the $3.5 trillion spending package. Pfizer announces that its COVID-19 vaccine is safe for children ages 5 to 11 and generated a “robust” immune response in a clinical trial. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, September 21st. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Doug Blair. In an unprecedented break from norms, President Joe Biden purged a number of appointees installed by former President Trump from their government boards. Appointees like Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer were bluntly told in a letter to resign or face termination within a day. Luke Roziak, an investigative reporter working for the Daily Wire, has extensively covered the incident. He joins the Daily Signal podcast. to discuss his reporting and the implications of this departure from precedent.

And don't forget, if you enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, and please encourage others to subscribe. And now on to today's top news. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visited the Texas border on Monday. In Del Rio, Texas, an estimated 12,000 or more migrants, largely from Haiti, have crossed into the U.S. and are staying by a bridge. Here's what Mayork has had to say via now this. We are very concerned that Haitians who are taking this irregular migration path

are receiving false information that the border is open or that temporary protected status is available. I want to make sure that it is known that this is not the way to come to the United States. That is false information. Irregular migration poses a serious security security. risk to the migrants themselves. Trying to enter the United States illegally is not worth the tragedy, the money, or the effort. Mayorkas also said flights were being arranged to take the migrants out of the U.S. Meanwhile, 26 governors wrote a letter to President Joe Biden demanding a meeting in the next couple of weeks. Governor Doug Deucy, Republican of Arizona, and the other governors

wrote, the negative impacts of an unenforced border policy on the American people can no longer be ignored. Border apprehensions are up almost 500% compared to last year, totaling more than 1.3 million, more people than the populations of nine U.S. states. Approximately 9,700 illegal apprehensions have prior criminal convictions. Cartels and traffickers are making 14 million a day, moving people illegally across the border. More fentanyl has been seized this fiscal year than the last three years combined, almost 10,500 pounds of fentanyl when only two milligrams prove fatal. This is enough to kill seven times the U.S. population. After Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough ruled Sunday that Democrats attempts to tie immigration policy into the proposed $3.5 trillion spending package

would not fall under the rules for reconciliation, Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat from Minnesota, called on Democratic leaders to ignore the ruling and push on with including the policies. On Monday, the Congresswoman tweeted, This ruling by the parliamentarian is only a recommendation. Senator Schumer and the White House can and should ignore it. We can't miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do the right thing. The Democrats' proposals would provide legal status and the potential for citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants, as well as green cards to other groups of immigrants,

including farm workers and temporary protected status holders. But the parliamentarian found that the proposed additions were not directly connected with the budget, a key requirement of legislation pass through the reconciliation process. The reconciliation process, which involves only needing 51 votes to pass a bill in the Senate, only applies to the budget. Per the Hill, McDonough wrote in her ruling, the policy changes of this proposal far outweigh the budgetary impact scored to it, and it is not appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation.

Foreign visitors can soon come to the U.S. again, regardless of the COVID-19 status of their country. But only if these visitors meet certain criteria. USA Today reports that visitors will need to be vaccinated and have a negative COVID-19 test within three days of departure, among other conditions, although no coroner. quarantine will be required. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted, I am delighted that from November, POTUS is reinstating transatlantic travel so fully vaccinated UK nationals can visit the USA. It's a fantastic boost for business and trade and great that family and friends on both sides of the pond can be reunited once again.

On Monday, drugmaker Pfizer announced that its COVID-19 vaccine is safe for kids ages 5 to 11 and generated a robust immune response in a clinical trial. Currently, vaccines are only approved for those 12 and older. Pfizer CEO Albert Borla announced last week that the clinical trial data could be submitted before the end of September, with a goal of approving the shots in time for Halloween. The clinical trial involved a two-dose regimen of 10 micrograms and ministered three weeks apart. Pfizer claimed that the regimen produced an immune response and side effects comparable to those experienced by people ages 16 to 25.

Clinical results for children younger than five are not expected until near the end of the year, per the New York Times. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Daily Wire reporter Luke Rosiak as we discuss his coverage of the unprecedented break in norms from the Biden administration. We're all guilty of it, spending too much time watching silly videos on the internet. But it's 2021. Maybe it's time for a change.

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Start watching now at heritage.org slash YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe and share. Our guest today is Luke, an investigative reporter working for the Daily Wire. Luke, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So before we get into your story that you wrote for the Daily Wire that really inspired me to reach out to you and arrange this interview, let's get to know you a little bit more.

So how did you get into investigative reporting and then how did you find your way to the Daily Wire? I always like computers and my background is kind of using data analysis to find the truth, you know, to find the needle in the haystack and to get information that other people haven't been able to work, you know, to kind of maneuver. We're kind of drowning in data to the point where there's good stories buried that you can find using a little bit of technology skills. So technology was always my secret weapon in journalism, and I worked for a couple different jobs in conservative as well as non-conservative media over the years. And I recently started working for The Daily Wire.

We're starting a new investigative team, and we want to start doing those sort of deep dives. So the reason I arranged an interview with you is one of your investigative reporting pieces really piqued my interest. So this piece that you wrote is titled Biden-perjish. Trump appointees from numerous boards in unprecedented departure from norms. This was a pretty big story. So for our listeners who maybe aren't aware of what happened, can you tell them what is the story behind that piece and then what some of the implications were? Sure.

So, you know, across the federal government, there are all these sort of obscure boards and commissions and advisory boards. Some of them are just advisory in nature, but other than are actually governing boards. and it's the kind of thing you know like Washington insiders are well aware like most of the people that actually run the government aren't famous right it's these little

people you it's these people you've never heard of but they're like specialists in their field and they're playing important roles so there's over a thousand of these commissions across the government that have different people appointed to them and typically they're appointed by presidents

for terms that are like three years long and those terms are staggered and they're you know it's basically specifically designed to give some non-partisanship or bipartisanship to the government so that the president is not you know everything is not politicized you've got people that are appointed from various administrations and they're you know once they're on the board they're on the board and so what Biden came along and did especially like this month is just kind of wiped out everyone that was appointed by Donald Trump to these various commissions, including, for example, the boards that oversee the service academies like West Point and the Naval Academy. And so, you know, you can see why you would want nonpartisan or representatives

of both parties on a board that's overseeing like how military service members are trained. it's pretty important that the schools not be, you know, become basically politicized or in service of one, you know, political administration. And so this is totally unprecedented for a new president to come in and wipe out everyone who was appointed by a prior president, even if their terms didn't expire for two more years. So when you use the word unprecedented, that obviously means that this is something that, hasn't happened before. Obviously, a lot of people might point to, oh, well, you know, the president before Biden did unprecedented things. The president before that might have done unprecedented things. Are you saying that this was kind of weird even in the context of President Trump didn't do this? And President Obama didn't do this. President Bush didn't do this.

I think you can go back even further than that and go back decades, if not 100 years in some cases. There may be outliers where an individual was removed for a specific reason. But in general, to come in and wipe out sort of systematically people whose terms have not expired just because of who they were appointed by. We've never really seen that before. It's a dramatic to use the term that a lot of people threw around when Trump was in office. It's a huge departure from norms. The question is, is it illegal?

In a lot of cases, it kind of seems to violate the spirit of the law, but it's pretty clearly not illegal. The president technically has the ability to rescind nominations from previous presidents and swipe out and, you know, put in his own people. In other cases, it actually could be illegal. Some of these government agencies are actually independent. They're not, obviously, a president's going to put his own people in the cabinet and he's got his own appointees to top roles. Of course, We all know that. No one objects to that. That's how it should be. But there are other places that are designed to be a little bit independent. And some examples are the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board where you actually want to have some isolation from politics and sometimes some representation from both political parties. And so Biden fired the general counsels of both of those groups. Now, that could be illegal. Those are independent agencies. They really are supposed to have some separation from the administration.

And it's kind of unclear. It's kind of a gray area. And that's largely because other presidents haven't done this. Right. So how are these justifications being kind of put out there? Is the Biden administration trying to say that these people are unqualified? Is the Biden administration trying to say they're political appointees? What is the justification being given for these terminations?

White House spokeswoman Jen Saki addressed it. In particular, some of this stuff didn't get much attention, but the military service boards really did. And that's where you had some people that were kind of well-known political figures like Sean Spicer. And I think Kelly Ann Conway was on one of those boards too. And so that's what they really used to say, oh, these are Trump lackeys and we had to get rid of them. Now, are they on qualified? That's what they said is that they're unqualified. I mean, Sean Spicer went to, you know, the Naval Academy. He's has a long record of military service.

I don't know that you can say he's on qualified. He's a high profile political figure. Sure. Kelly Ann Conway, I don't know. But number one, I mean, being conservative doesn't mean you're on qualified, obviously. The president has the right to appoint his people, especially if you are qualified, uh, removing. Well, so let me say, I mean, most of them aren't political figures at all. Most of these said there's this group called the Arctic Research Commission. And it conducts research, you know, involving, I don't know, Alaska stuff, geopolitical affairs involving Russia and things like that. But it's largely kind of this group populated by scientists and things like that.

And so there's this guy, Thomas, Emmanuel, Danz, and he was basically actually several Trump appointees were wiped out of this group. But the thing is, the ARC, the Arctic Research Commission, was populated almost entirely by Obama appointees during the entirety of the Trump administration. So here you can see kind of proof that other administrations haven't violated these norms and politicized these obscure agencies because some of these members were actually of the Arctic Research Commission were actually critical of Trump. And so while Trump is in office, he's got these government officials who are, you know, talking bad about him publicly. But he didn't fire them because it would be a huge departure of norms. So this is the kind of thing that people are always implying that Trump was going to do. He's going to politicize the bureaucracy. He's going to inject politics into places that's really important, are beholden to norms and are separated from politics.

He didn't do that. And kind of the best case study, the best example of that is how many people were over. openly undermining Trump while he was in office. The fact that he didn't fire those people shows that he wasn't actually violating those norms. And so here we have Biden purging groups as obscure as the Arctic Research Commission from people that sometimes are just like scientists or whatever. They're not like Trump lackeys. They're not high-profile people. But the other interesting thing that we should make sure to mention is how,

Because it's really funny. Originally, the Biden administration didn't seem to want to do these firings because they know it's really weird. It's really sketchy to fire all these people. So what they did is they said, well, let's just not have any of the groups meet. If we're going to have to have a Trump person in the room, let's just not meet at all. And so that's kind of a big deal because these groups are, we have them for a reason. One of the groups is tasked with overseeing questions of science in education. It's under the reports to the Department of Education.

And so they just didn't meet for all of this year because they had a couple Trump guys on the board who were like professors and stuff like that. But they just didn't want them in the room. And so think about that. I mean, we're dealing with coronavirus. The schools are shut down. Everyone's trying to assess like how do we deal with coronavirus in the classroom? The science requires a lot of review. We want to make sure it's on bias.

We want to make sure it's not being used to push a political agenda. well, we've got a committee expressly for this purpose, and it just didn't meet for all of 2021. So that's what's kind of shocking here is the venom, sort of the personal animosity towards Trump, but not just Trump, but just random people that maybe tangentially linked to him through some appointment to an obscure board was so great that they were willing to just cease operations of certain government boards to avoid any, even the slightest influence. of anyone tied to Trump. Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because one of the parts of your piece that really stuck out to me was this idea that the Biden administration kind of basically would rather that nothing would actually happen as opposed to working with the Trump appointees. The one that really struck me was the National Education Board that as the pandemic basically

forced these schools to stay closed and there were debates over masking and debates over can we, you know, do anything other than virtual learning. There was no discussion going on. And it sounds like from what you're saying, this is a lot of you're saying, this was a pretty common tactic. Yeah, and that's kind of what's on clear here is the question is like, did they just wipe out every single person that was appointed by Trump? We don't really know, and I haven't been able to get an answer to that.

I mean, there's a database of these appointments, but it's just not been updated at all. I've contacted the people in charge. They haven't really gotten back to me. Was this systematic? So when Kellyanne Conway, excuse me, when Jen Saki says, well, we've, you know, we've just removed some unqualified people, they're really trying to, are they just saying that anyone appointed by Trump is automatically unqualified? Even though some of these people are like professors at, you know, Johns Hopkins University and things like that, it's kind of hard to argue that they're

unqualified in many cases, unless your definition of unqualified just means anyone who might be conservative. But, you know, this is, there's an element of secrecy around this to the point where we've seen enough examples where it seems to be essentially systematic, but we don't know. Is this a complete wipeout of everyone or not? And the government, I contacted the White House as well, because they were sending letters to these people that were super curt. They were just kind of like very kind of crazy letters that were like, you will resign by the end of today or else you will be fired at 6 p.m. No other explanation. And so I contacted the lady from the White House personnel office whose name was on these letters. she didn't get back to me either but it's a big deal you know i mean you don't have to just you don't

have to like trump you didn't of course he's a previous president the the Biden doesn't have to come in and somehow um basically you know this is just for a hundred years the other president you have to deal with people that um have been appointed to fix terms that's just what you do i mean the Clinton didn't wipe out people uh George Bush didn't wipe out people uh George Bush didn't wipe out people, Donald Trump didn't wipe out, people that Obama pointed. This is just the way that it's always been done and it was clearly set up by Congress to be this way for a reason. And so when Biden is doing this, it really is rewriting norms and it's a scorched approach to governing. And obviously, you're essentially setting a precedent that other, you have to assume that other presidents are going

to do this, including Republican presidents. And, you know, I don't know if that's really a good thing. for for any of us. Right, right. Yeah, you know, when I think about how the military service academies are governed or how when how science, you know, the potential for politicization of science in education, kind of some, you do want people from both sides. You can say, well, maybe this, you know, there's ideological bias here. It's, it can be helpful to have Republicans around in certain cases like that the Equal Opportunity

Commission where the civil rights issues at play. Like, there are different perspective in the world. You don't need to totally purge them. It's okay to have, like, on advisory boards, like, one guy who can maybe offer the conservative perspective. Congress did set it up that way for a reason. Right. I mean, I'm so glad that you brought up that word as precedent and these ideas that, you know, we had these rules and we had these precedents in place for a reason. You kind of started speaking to those consequences of the norms and precedents being broken.

but could you maybe expand a little bit more on what you view as some of the worst aspects of, well, you know, we've crossed the Rubicon here. The dam is broken. Now what? Well, yeah. I mean, this is, I think that it's so bizarre because this is everything that people implied was going to happen under Trump, but never really happened. And those concerns, if true, under Trump, would have been caused for concern for sure. You don't want to politicize the everyday bureaucracy of the government. You don't want to inject politics into every single cranny as if, you know, the guy sitting around studying snowfall in the Arctic is like, has to do with Donald Trump. It's a poisonous way to view things. And I don't know. I guess it's, it's really, it's ironic

because Trump was undermined by a lot of people in the civil service, you know, when Republicans talk about the deep state and things like that. I mean, they were kind of actually. acting partisan and he could have fired them, but he didn't. And it, because it really would have been inappropriate. It's inappropriate for, you know, bureaucrats act partisan on their own, but it's also inappropriate for presidents to push politics onto them. But, yeah, I think it's just the, the, the part of, the, the politicization of every aspect of life is something that I think is super poisonous to Americans.

Sean Spicer talked to us at the Daily Wire and he said, you know, the service academies and in general the military was kind of one of the last aspects of American life that wasn't poisoned by this obsession with politics. And it was really important to keep it that way. It was nice to keep it that way. But it's also important for the government. It's clearly, I mean, the military absolutely should not be politicized. Just constitutionally speaking, it's very important not to keep it to keep it separated from, you know, partisan influence. And, you know, you've heard, we've seen stories about them doing things like teaching critical race theory at West Point and, you know, even teachers that have said some communist-sounding things at, like, the Air Force Academy. Like, it's, there are really serious problems that can happen when our long-term institutions, which are kind of designed to keep our country stable over the course of many decades, become beholden to a White House.

that may only be in office for four years. This was set up by Congress for a reason. We got to keep it that way. And, you know, but now we're in a position where, like, if a Republican takes the White House and they don't do this, in some sense, it's going to be like, are they just being weak? So it's really, it's a scorched earth approach to governing. It's poisoning our culture at a time when we probably have too much politics already,

coming into, you know, corporations and sports and everything. And it's not a return to normalcy, which is kind of what Biden build himself as providing if voters chose him. I think that's a really interesting thing to think about. And I think there is a lot to think about from this conversation. Now, unfortunately, Luke, we are running a little bit low on time. So I wanted to give the last word to you if our listeners would like to read this piece, the Biden purges Trump appointees from numerous boards and unprecedented departure from norms, or some of your other work, where should they go?

You can find it on the DailyWire.com and, you know, do check us out. We're starting to do more investigative reporting over at the DailyWire. So we've got, you know, the companies off bringing new things all the time. We're expanding and a lot of exciting stuff going on over there at the DailyWire. Excellent. Well, Luke, Luke, thank you so much for joining us. That was Luke Rosiac, an investigative reporter. working for the Daily Wire. Luke, as I said, thank you so much. Great to be with you.

And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeart Radio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, and please encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Virginia Allen and Kate Trinko, sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visit DailySignal.com.