Op-ed: Michael Chamberlain: If personnel is policy, the Biden-Harris administration’s policies are just weird

McDonald’s legend Ray Kroc once said that “you’re only as good as the people you hire.” He was hiring people to make hamburgers. The Reagan administration translated that to governing: “personnel is policy.” If that’s true, what does it say about policy that 92 percent of the people who went to work for Vice President Kamala Harris have already left? That casualty rate would leave the men who planned the Battle of the Somme reeling at the senseless attrition.

Then there are the … interesting people the Biden-Harris administration has hired over the last three years. One can only call these personnel judgements weird.

Remember Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley? He headed up the Biden-Harris administration’s hush-hush negotiations with the Iranian regime: an effort to resurrect the Iranian nuclear deal President Donald Trump had scuttled. Malley came under investigation for mishandling classified documents, and the Oversight Committee found that he and members of his team “may have had compromising ties to the Iranian regime.” He was suspended without pay and the investigation was turned over to the FBI.

Bureau of Land Management appointee Tracy Stone-Manning apparently lied on her Senate confirmation paperwork, claiming she’d never been the subject of a criminal investigation. Media reports showed she had. In 1989, as a member of the radical group Earth First, she was granted immunity for cooperating with an investigation into ecoterrorism. She allegedly helped plan “tree spiking” (driving metal spikes into trees to discourage logging) in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest. BLM manages 65 million acres of forest.

Consider Assistant Director of Health and Human Services (HHS), Rachel Levine. According to court documents, “Admiral Levine” pressured a prominent transgender medical organization to drop any recommended age requirements for transition treatments. Levine is a transgender activist and a doctor — in that order, it seems. Levine declared that “gender-affirming care for children is “medically necessary, safe and effective,” and that “there is no argument among medical professionals” about the extreme treatments and that questioning it is “unconscionable.”

My organization, Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT), recently did the unconscionable and made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the medical and scientific documentation behind Levine’s pronouncements. HHS managed to produce only a single, two-page “information sheet” that was publicly available on HHS’s website. 

Sam Brinton was deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy, until he was charged with multiple counts of stealing women’s luggage from airports — including while traveling on government business. Prior to his much-lauded appointment to the administration, Brinton had been the head of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the anti-Catholic group of LGBT men who dress as Catholic nuns. Brinton went by “Sister Ray Dee O’Active.”

Now, there’s Tyler Cherry, until recently communications director at the Department of the Interior (DOI). He’s moved up to the big time as an associate communications director at the White House. But not before he spent two days deleting old tweets.

When Cherry was promoted in June, some of his old X posts began to resurface: radical far-left tweets full of hatred for Israel, the police, Republicans, capitalism, and more. To make matters worse, he had his history wrong: “Apt time to recall that the modern day police system is a direct evolution of slave patrols and lynch mobs.” In 2015, as race riots shook Baltimore, Cherry tweeted: “Praying for #Baltimore, but praying even harder for an end to a capitalistic police state motivated by explicit and implicit racial biases.”

“Cheersing in bars to ending the occupation of Palestine – no shame and f*** your glares #ISupportGaza #FreePalestine,” Cherry wrote in 2014, as hundreds of Hamas rockets rained down on Israeli civilians. In 2017, he called Republicans a party of “white grievance,” and in 2018 he called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

When these posts began circulating in June, Cherry deleted all of his nearly 2,500 tweets, replacing them with just one that read in part: “Past social media posts from when I was younger do not reflect my current views.”

Perhaps not, but Cherry’s old tweets had originally been publicized by conservatives on social media during 2023. He didn’t delete them then and apparently nobody in the agency’s ethics office gave the matter any scrutiny.

Furthermore, at some point during his DOI tenure, Cherry’s X account became a verified government account bearing the gray checkmark X uses to designate such accounts. DOI allowed Cherry to operate the account containing these radical posts in its name. Worse for Interior, when Cherry moved to the White House, the account should have remained under DOI control. Deleting those posts amounted to destroying federal records. That wouldn’t have happened had DOI’s leadership and ethics personnel done their jobs. And Cherry has since locked down his still-gray checkmarked account. 

Maybe Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s time could have been better spent instructing her staff on remedial ethics rather than traveling to Chicago last week for a two-and-a-half-minute campaign speech at the DNC. On the other hand, the DNC and the two Democratic members of the Federal Elections Commission who attended the Convention as “honored guests” have their own ethics issues to sort out.

For its part, the White House, through senior deputy press secretary and Hatch Act violator Andrew Bates, said only that it was “very proud to have Tyler on the team.” So much for the self-proclaimed most transparent administration in history.

PPT has found numerous situations in which the failings of career ethics officials compounded the Biden-Harris administration’s questionable personnel judgements. The next president, whoever that is, must begin applying commonsense to its hires, and demand professionalism and accountability from its ethics officials. Otherwise, they can go make hamburgers.