The Biden Administration Is Making a Habit of Ousting Officials from Non-Partisan Positions

Last month, the Biden administration pushed out former Health and Human Services Department official (and my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague) Roger Severino from his role on the non-partisan Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS).

The ACUS is meant to study administrative processes and advise the government on ways to improve efficiency, separate from executive power, and Severino was appointed to a three-year term on the council in the late days of the Trump administration.

In a lawsuit seeking to prevent the Biden administration from accomplishing this ouster, Severino states that the White House personnel office improperly pressured him to resign from the advisory role shortly after his term had started and, when he refused to do so, fired him. The move was highly atypical, as members of the ACUS are tied to neither political party and have no executive authority.

The administration’s decision to axe Severino came shortly after Biden fired Peter Robb, top prosecutor at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), under pressure from labor unions. General-counsel members at the NLRB  typically serve four-year terms and are meant to be non-partisan, making the firing especially unprecedented. As with Severino, Biden pressured Robb to resign and, when he refused, fired him.

Then, just last week, Biden fired Sharon Fast Gustafson, general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), after she refused his request to resign from her post. In a letter to the president, Gustafson noted that she had been confirmed to a four-year term in August 2019. “Unless prevented from doing so, I intend to honor that commitment,” she wrote.

Gustafson also pointed out that the statutes she worked to enforce “were passed with bipartisan support,” and she asserted that the Biden administration had provided no reason as to why she was expected to resign. Her letter stated, too, that while she is unaware of which Biden advisers pushed for her resignation, she knows that many oppose to her work at the EEOC to prevent discrimination against religious employees and organizations.

At the American Conservative, Rod Dreher notes that, judging from Gustafson’s work, the decision to fire her suggests that the “Biden administration not interested in all in religious liberty in the workplace, because at times it clashes with LGBT priorities.”

No doubt the Biden administration intends to appoint a successor to Gustafson who not only will fail to work on behalf of religious minorities as she did but in fact will actively undermine their existing rights to accomplish progressive policy aims.

The Biden administration’s campaign to clear out non-partisan appointees from the previous administration indicates that the president has little interest in actually fostering the unity he claims to promote. Media observers and pundits, meanwhile, are eerily silent on the matter — especially considering how much vitriol they directed at President Trump each time he fired an official from a non-partisan post.