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It’s been over 764 days since Donald Trump left the White House, yet his legacy still – even years into Biden’s own term – continues to pervade our highest echelons of government.

President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address is next Tuesday. Amid an uprising sparked by yet another horrific video of police violence, deep uncertainty about U.S. fiscal and monetary policy, and continuing wars and threats around the world, the nation — or at least, the politics junkies in the nation — will gather to hear the President lay out his agenda to a Congress absolutely no one reasonably expects will deliver on it, or likely even take it all that seriously.

It was a slow fall for independent agency nominations as Senators left chambers for their campaigns and the Biden administration stood paralyzed in anticipation of the midterm Red Wave That Wasn’t. 

President Biden drew outrage and forceful opposition last fall after nominating Casey T. Arrowood to the position of United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, based on Arrowood’s role in the baseless prosecution of a Chinese-Canadian professor under the Trump DOJ’s “China initiative.” Fortunately, with the new year and the convening of a new Congress, all pending nominees must be renominated, providing Biden another chance to do the right thing and drop Arrowood from consideration.

More than two years into Joe Biden’s presidency, Biden has nominated 67 people to the 93 offices that compose the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO). After one post-confirmation withdrawal  of Marisa Darden, 66 offices or 71 percent currently have nominees to the position; only 60 nominees or 64.5 percent have been fully confirmed to their office. 

How better to mark the darkest day of the year than with a bit of dark humor? This winter solstice, we present our 2022 Revolving Door Superlatives, where we spotlight the most craven, captured, and corrupt personnel and policy debates of this past year. From Revolver of the Year to 2022’s Worst Look to our Biggest Personnel Nightmare Entering 2023, we have a positively ghoulish assemblage of honorees for your perverse reading pleasure. Take comfort, dear reader, in this at least: the days are only getting longer from here on out. 

Last month, Jamie Rhome, the current Acting Director of the National Hurricane Center (NHC), effectively rejected settled climate science while discussing the then-potential severity and impact of Hurricane Ian. In that interview, Rhome said he would “caution against” linking the intensity of Hurricane Ian to climate change. To be clear, there is no question or ambiguity on this link. The worsening severity of extreme weather events as a result of climate change is something that has been firmly established, for years, by other federal agencies – like NASA – and also by international research bodies – like the National Academies – which makes Rhome’s refusal to do so all the more baffling. 

An alternate vision for how Democrats could bring the fight to the midterms by taking action in Congress and the White House

The news was flooded in September with images, reports, and increasingly abhorrent context for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ trafficking of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard as a political stunt. DeSantis’ actions, and those of his aides, are of course potentially illegal, as was asserted by a Texas sheriff who opened a criminal investigation into the spectacle. This latest sadistic political posturing came at the cost of real people fleeing real persecution, but there is also a crucial piece of this awful puzzle that hasn’t been fully explored. Why did Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents, funded by federal dollars, allegedly forge documents for migrants knowing (even if the migrants themselves didn’t) that their flights were not destined for the locales DHS agents made their immigration proceedings beholden to?

Personnel is policy, which means that the people who make up our federal institutions matter. Which means that the partisan Republican assault on the staffing up of the federal agencies that regulate so much of the public’s everyday life also matters greatly. Unfortunately, as we have highlighted for months and will continue to highlight for as long as it persists, the federal government is being gutted from the inside out by a blockade of overdue qualified leadership. 

Today the Revolving Door Project released a petition calling on Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo to remove Acting Director Jamie Rhome from his position running the National Hurricane Center (NHC) at the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA).

As we at the Revolving Door Project have long argued, the crisis surrounding the confirmations (or rather, the lack thereof) of Biden’s highly qualified nominees remains an issue of critical importance.