President Biden has NOT done a clean sweep of Trump admin people…..
Remember….
Trump held on and did NOT approve a transition until late in November last year…
Politico looks at the situation 82 days into the Biden admin….
Welcome to POLITICO’s 2021 Transition Playbook, your guide to the first 100 days of the Biden administration
Democrats were not happy when President DONALD TRUMP nominated BRIAN MILLER, a lawyer in his White House counsel’s office, as special inspector general overseeing the pandemic recovery efforts last year.
“Your time working as one of President’s Trump’s impeachment defense attorneys should have disqualified you from being nominated to oversee the president’s management of one of the largest corporate bailouts in American history,” Sen. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-Mass.) told Miller during his confirmation hearing. Just one Democratic senator — former Sen.DOUG JONES (D-Ala.) — voted to confirm him.
Nearly three months after President JOE BIDEN took office, however, Miller still has a job. He’s one of dozens of Trump administration appointees who remain in office, either temporarily or for the foreseeable future.
Miller spent nine years working as the General Services Administration’s inspector general under Presidents GEORGE W. BUSH and BARACK OBAMA before serving in Trump’s White House. He was praised by some oversight experts when Trump nominated him.
Still, Warren’s opinion of him doesn’t seem to have improved.
“Brian Miller has shown himself to be a partisan and unprofessional leader by refusing to investigate examples of corrupt lobbying for CARES Act funds by former Trump officials,” Warren said in a statement to Transition Playbook. “He needs to start taking his job seriously.”
A spokesperson for Miller’s office said he “admires Senator Warren’s interest in rooting out corporate corruption and holding officials accountable” and would like to work with her as he investigates “those improperly benefitting from CARES Act funds.”
While presidents are allowed to fire inspectors general, it can spark a backlash if they do.
President RONALD REAGAN was criticized for dismissing 16 inspectors general after he took office in 1981. (He reinstated five of them months later.) President BARACK OBAMA faced similar blowback when he fired GERALD WALPIN, the little-known inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service, months after taking office. He never fired another IG.
Trump was not known for shying away from public backlash. And he generated an outcry of his own — largely from Democrats — last year when he ousted several inspectors general who had oversight of agencies ranging from the State Department to the intelligence community. “I think we’ve been treated very unfairly by inspector generals,” he said at the time.
The White House declined to comment on why it had decided to keep Miller on board. But MICHAEL GWIN, a White House spokesperson, told The New York Times earlier this year that Biden was committed to protecting the “independent role” of inspectors general in his administration.
It’s not unusual for new presidents to keep a handful of their predecessors’ officials on the job, and Biden has kept dozens of them in office, according to data provided by the Partnership for Public Service.
Many of them are ambassadors, whose replacements Biden hasn’t had a chance to nominate yet, or inspectors general. The Railroad Retirement Board’s inspector general, MARTIN JAY DICKMAN, has been in office since 1994, when President BILL CLINTON nominated him.
But others are more powerful….
In your words…
Big Deal.
This isn’t particularly unusual.
Must be a slow news day.
I thought (or would have thought) that Inspectors General were intended to be the kind of independent non-partisan authority who serves above and beyond the changes of party politics, like the Director of the F.B.I. (formally reporting to an often semi-partisan Attorney-General), the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors or the Comptroller-General of the U.S. (head of the G.A.O., or Government Accountability — formerly General Accouning — Office).
Were that the case, one would expect, rather than be surprised by, I-G’s service straddling different administrations (just as a city solicitor or police chief will serve under several different mayors or city councils).
But on the other hand, the first person to whom they send reports is the President himself (over the heads of Cabinet Secretaries) before they tell (or are permitted to tell) the Attorney-General (where criminal or civil action is indicated), Congress, the press and the public.
As I remember the discussion over Trump’s firing of the I-G’s (some holdovers, some appointed by him), Inspectors General were an institution thrust upon unwilling Chief Executives by Congress.