Biden Breaks Historic Political Norms, Fires Independent Board Appointees

U.S. President Joe Biden stops to briefly speak with reporters on his way to Marine One on
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Allum Bokhari

The Biden administration has broken with historical norms by firing Trump-appointed members of independent agencies serving fixed terms, a move that one appointee claims is illegal in a lawsuit. At least one Democrat supporting the effort says this must be done because some of the appointees are too white.

It is unprecedented for a new administration to fire members of independent agencies serving fixed terms. But the Biden administration is trying to do so anyway. One appointee, Roger Severino, is suing the Biden administration over its decision to terminate him.

“The Council does not wield any executive power — indeed, it does not wield any power at all as a purely advisory entity — so President Biden has no constitutional power to terminate Mr. Severino or any other member of the Council,” states Severino’s lawsuit.

Severino was appointed to serve a three-year term on the Administrative Conference of the United States, but the Biden administration opted to removed him prematurely.

The administration has also fired several other Trump appointees serving fixed terms, including Jennifer Dickey, Andrew Kloster, Paul Dans, Gibson Worsham, and Dan Epstein.

Removing members of independent agencies serving fixed terms is unprecedented. Despite four years of allegations that President Trump was destroying age-old political norms, he never attempted to remove President Obama’s appointees.

The man leading the purge is Gautam Raghavan, deputy director of the influential Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), which handles the hiring and firing of approximately 4,000 political appointees across the administration.

In 2017, Raghavan, who is gay, named-and-shamed a TSA officer on social media, implying without evidence that the officer was unfairly targeting homosexual couples for searches.

There appears to be a wider cultural agenda behind some of the efforts. Pressure is also mounting to fire every Trump appointee on two of the agencies that oversee planning for the city of Washington D.C., the National Capital Planning Commission and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

These boards have jurisdiction over monuments and statues in the District, as well as over the naming of streets, statues, and monuments.

According to the Democrat deputy mayor of D.C., John Falcichio, one of the reasons why these appointees have to go is because they’re too white.

“With these appointments, the CFA now consists entirely of white, male Trump appointees supportive of the former administration’s ill-conceived Executive Order, ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,’ which seeks to make our Nation’s Capital a mausoleum of neoclassical architecture,” Falcicchio complained, in a letter to the Biden administration.

The executive order that Falcichio alleges will turn the capital into a “mausoleum” is intended to move federal architecture away from widely-derided Brutalist designs, and back to the Greco-Roman neoclassical style of D.C’s most iconic buildings, including the Capitol Building, the White House, and the Jefferson Memorial.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.

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