Trump’s presidency was unprecedented in its corruption at virtually all levels of executive branch agencies.
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Today marks an important milestone in the longest presidential race in United States history: the long-awaited (or perhaps dreaded) debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. For most casual followers of politics, tonight’s debate will likely serve as their first meaningful engagement with the candidates’ policies and platforms. All the more reason for the CNN team—producers, moderators, and anchors—to approach their role as debate hosts as a crucial public service. One way to do this would be to appropriately center tonight’s conversation around the candidates’ track records of leading the sprawling federal executive branch. In other words, focus on the president’s primary responsibility under the Constitution: to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
This is not a new argument. Just over a year ago, I wrote in the Prospect about the need to avoid the narrow framing of presidential elections as personality contests and the importance of foregrounding candidates’ plans to run the executive branch. The central narrative of that piece was a plea to the media to highlight the conservative plan to hollow out government capacity and leverage executive power to punish political enemies, which we can now simply dub Project 2025. Thankfully, there has been significant coverage of this right-wing mission to dismantle American democracy. But to fully understand Trump’s appetite for a ruinous agenda, it’s important to revisit how he directed the executive branch while in power.
We at the Revolving Door Project did just that, with a series of Trump retrospective memos that show how utterly indifferent the Trump administration was to the public interest. The memos remind readers how Trump and his cast of conflicted appointees exploited the federal government to either personally enrich themselves or worsen the lives of the American people.
There’s a common descriptor for many of Trump’s appointments: corrupt. Take for example his first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, a climate change denialist who stepped down having “misspent millions in public funds on 24/7 private security, first-class plane tickets, chartered jets, and renovations.” Or his initial secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, who similarly “resigned amid over a dozen ongoing ethics investigations, including one referred to the Justice Department examining a deal Zinke negotiated with fossil fuel company Halliburton to develop land adjacent to an empty plot Zinke owned.”
The list of embarrassing appointees didn’t end there. Trump’s initial Federal Emergency Management Agency chief, Brock Long, also vacated his office, amid investigations into his misuse of government vehicles in commutes from Washington to his home state of North Carolina. That’s not even as egregious as his first health and human services secretary, Tom Price, who chartered private jets on the public’s dime to the tune of $341,000, including a $14,955 round-trip charter flight between Washington and Philadelphia.
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who publicly acknowledged that “having me as a federal bureaucrat would be like a fish out of water,” regularly brought his wife and son to the agency’s offices, so often that The Washington Post questioned whether Ben Jr. was “wielding interest over decisions that might benefit his company,” an infrastructure investment firm. In fact, Ben Jr. and his wife Merlynn Carson were awarded a $485,000 contract by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) three months after helping organize an agency event that included an invitation to former CMS administrator Seema Verma. (Verma did not attend the event.)
Trump’s transportation secretary Elaine Chao was cut from the same cloth. Chao was cited by the DOT’s inspector general for repeatedly using staff to help family members who run Foremost, a major shipping company with ties to China. Even as her department oversaw the American shipping industry, Chao attempted to carry along her father and sister on an official government visit to China, and include them in meetings with government officials that would have potentially impacted their business interests. Chao abruptly canceled the planned trip after her request was referred to ethics officials in the State and Transportation Departments.
When Trump’s band of cronies weren’t focused on personal enrichment, they eagerly implemented rules that materially harmed the lives of most Americans. At the Department of Education, billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos rewrote the Borrower Defense to Repayment rule, which was designed to protect students and borrowers from predatory for-profit colleges (like the one operated by her boss, Donald Trump). During the rewrite process, the Education Department stopped reviewing cases brought under the rule, accumulating hundreds of thousands of students’ complaints, before ultimately restricting defrauded students’ ability to shed their debts. What’s more, DeVos shuttered the special team at the department, which had been investigating for-profit colleges’ abusive practices, weeks after hiring former for-profit college officials into key positions at the department.
The Trump administration’s approach to environmental policymaking and regulation, which included the rollback of over 100 environmental safeguards, inflicted significant damage on public health. According to a report in The Lancet, the rollback of environmental and workplace safety regulations killed 22,000 people in 2019 alone. These reversals also generated an increase in air pollution in heavily industrialized states after 47 years of decline, generating more premature births, premature deaths, and chronic health conditions. Specifically, the “rollback of Obama’s Clean Power Plan was estimated to cause an additional 1,400 premature deaths per year, as well as sickening tens of thousands.”
On top of this, the EPA completely abandoned its responsibility to enforce the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act and crack down on corporate polluters. The agency actually set about making water dirtier and more hazardous. Under Trump, the EPA “slowed the process of replacing lead pipes (lead pipe replacement has since accelerated under Biden, thanks to funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law), removed federal protection for over fifty percent of wetlands and 18 percent of rivers and streams (the Trump-appointed conservatives on the Supreme Court deepened this blow in Sackett v. United States), cut clean water infrastructure funding, and loosened the requirements for monitoring groundwater around coal ash disposal sites (a loophole which Biden closed).”
Consumer protection took a back seat at Trump’s financial regulatory agencies. It’s no surprise considering that three of his major appointments—Steven Mnuchin, Joseph Otting, and Brian Brooks—were all alumni of OneWest Bank, which “became infamous for its aggressive foreclosure practices that preyed on the elderly, as well ruthlessly discriminating against racial minorities in California when disbursing home loans.” As Treasury secretary, Mnuchin drove the administration’s deregulation campaign. His colleague at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Otting, attempted to “modernize” the Community Reinvestment Act, a law intended to combat redlining, by easing compliance requirements for lenders. When Brooks replaced Otting at the OCC, he similarly prioritized corporate interests by loosening “lending restrictions on predatory consumer finance institutions like payday lenders, permitting them to issue loans at illegally high rates as long as a partner bank was named as lender and provider of the loan.” Congress eventually struck down this rule via the Congressional Review Act.
Elsewhere at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney and his successor Kathy Kraninger targeted the repeal of the bureau’s 2017 payday lending rulemaking. Mulvaney eliminated the rule’s underwriting provisions, which required lenders to check borrowers’ ability to repay loans when due. What’s more, Mulvaney worked to sabotage the agency with a number of disgraceful decisions, including submitting a $0 quarterly budget request, installing political cronies into senior supervisory positions, pausing fine collection, and suspending active investigations. Mulvaney also reduced fines for lawbreaking companies to such an extent that media nicknamed it “the Mulvaney discount.”
Recently, Trump has proposed exempting workers’ tips from federal income taxes, in a bid to make tipped workers “very happy.” It’s an unserious idea that would likely have no impact on workers’ tax burden, since many tipped workers earn too little to even owe federal taxes. Worse, Trump’s actual record on this issue is the authorization of wage theft by his Department of Labor, which introduced a rule that “allowed restaurant owners to control the allocation of tip pools, with no limitations on the category of employees that can be beneficiaries of the tip pool.” Trump’s Labor Department, run by Antonin Scalia’s son Eugene, also limited the pool of salaried workers eligible for overtime pay, lowering the threshold for consideration from workers who made under $47,476 to those who made under $35,000.
Another defining characteristic of the Trump administration was its absolute inability to respond to crises, which was often a reflection of the former president’s expedient nature. Under Trump, FEMA, the emergency relief agency, “abrogated its duty to promote resiliency and support recovery without discrimination.” The paradigmatic example is its contemptible response to hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico, especially when juxtaposed with the immediate response to Hurricane Harvey that hit Texas. Politico found that “FEMA and the Trump administration exerted a faster, and initially greater, effort in Texas, even though the damage in Puerto Rico exceeded that in Houston.” Trump even claimed that both Hurricane Maria and Irma were not real disasters, withholding recovery funds for Puerto Rico until 2020, years after the storms.
Trump’s FEMA was similarly incompetent with one of the most profound management failures of the Trump era: the coronavirus pandemic. A report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found that the agency did not appropriately track its distribution of resources, reporting inaccurate data, which imperiled the national emergency response.
Trump’s health care appointments did not fare any better. His second HHS secretary, Alex Azar—a former Eli Lilly executive who approved a tripling of the price of insulin during his decade-long spell at the pharmaceutical company—completely bungled the administration’s pandemic response. Azar misled the public about the pandemic’s severity and the department’s preparedness for handling it, particularly lying about the development of diagnostic tests. On the management front, Azar hired Brian Harrison, a former aide with little to no public-health experience, to lead the department’s day-to-day response. Harrison’s most significant professional experience was in dog breeding.
Additionally, Azar sidelined Rick Bright, the former Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority director, who argued for rigorous vetting of hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug Trump had touted as a COVID-19 treatment. Azar was no different than his then-boss, who foolishly villainized the country’s top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, a prelude to the right-wing campaign to demonize federal civil servants, summarily fire them, and replace them with cronies.
This is a partial list. The Prospect did a series in 2020 called Mapping Corruption that goes into even more detail on the practices of Trump’s federal agencies.
As election season heats up, it’s critical for reporters and editors to pair fresh coverage with clear reminders of the candidates’ records of administering the executive branch. An honest representation of these records would show how Trump and his hand-picked leadership treated the federal government as either their personal fief or a conduit for institutionalizing corporate interests.
Image Credit: “Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0