Governance

Joe Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should not make the same mistake.

Joe Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should not make the same mistake.

Joe Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should not make the same mistake.

Joe Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should not make the same mistake.

Joe Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should not make the same mistake.

Joe Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should not make the same mistake.

Joe Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should not make the same mistake.

Contra Matt Yglesias, Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Harris should not make the same mistake.

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.

This summer saw an extremely slow rate of independent agency nominations coming from the White House, and witnessed also a similarly glacial pace of confirmations emerging from the Senate. While this trend got slightly better over the course of the fall, with the Senate finally making significant movement on the nominations already presented before it, few new nominations have emerged from the White House since July 18, 2023.  

Ever wonder who’s behind gross smear campaigns to sink qualified Biden administration nominees? Look no further than the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a little-known rightwing opposition research organization housed under the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) umbrella. The oppo shop was founded in 2021 with a simple goal: “to take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration.” Since then, AAF has targeted over twenty nominees with slanderous, bad-faith attacks. The strategy has been relatively successful thus far, especially in derailing racial and ethnic minority and female nominees, including Saule Omarova, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Carlton Waterhouse, and Gigi Sohn.