A Hole the Size of China in Biden’s Personnel Policies

Time to return to merit, competency, and experience in hiring decisions

Biden administration priorities are unchanged since January 2021. Here is part of the list from the official White House website (emphasis added): “… actions to control the COVID-19 pandemic, provide economic relief, tackle climate change, and advance racial equity and civil rights...”

Those priorities were immediately incorporated in personnel policies through Executive Orders, for example, the “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation” (posted here), which Biden signed on his first day in office. This EO directed all federal agencies to end sexual discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” or sexual orientation and opened the door with the stroke of a pen (as opposed to congressionally debated and passed legislation) to the hiring by federal agencies of people historically considered to be suffering from sexual dysphoria and mental disorders.

Similarly, Marxist “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology (precedents discussed here) has also infused federal hiring practices. Thus, identity politics has replaced merit, competency, and experience as the primary consideration for filling job vacancies in this administration; the top priority is the hiring of Democrat-defined “disadvantaged groups,” including women, LGBTQI people, and racial minorities.

The country was watched some of the results of those hiring actions with shock, humor, and outrage, depending on circumstance. For example:

• The “non-binary” deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy who stole a woman’s luggage at an airport

• The antics of an absurd transgender (sic) assistant secretary in the Health and Human Services department, who once advocated chemical castration of children

• An Afro-American lesbian White House press secretary (probably a “two-fer” in the thinking of White House personnel directors) who daily makes a fool of herself during press briefings (see here, here, and here)

• The demonstrated incompetence and weakness of an Afro-American secretary of defense in the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the rebuffed attempts to contact his Chinese counterpart after the Chinese balloon was shot down, whose first action as SECDEF was a department-wide standdown to “root out extremism” (misplaced priorities!)

• The demonstrated incompetence of a homosexual secretary of the Transportation Dept in response to seaport blockages, US domestic flight groundings, and train wrecks (and “controlled burns” of highly toxic chemicals!)

If merit, competency, and experience were important hiring considerations, none of these people would have been appointed to their positions. Perhaps a return to sanity in making hiring decisions is in order.

However, it would appear that the top priority of identity politics is not the worst problem with Biden administration hiring practices. The worst by far is the apparent willful blindness of hiring managers to the potential compromise of candidates by communist China through elite capture. Investigative journalist and author of the best-selling book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win defines the CCPs strategy of elite capture as “looping in American business titans with lucrative contracts or deals that get them to look the other way as Beijing rises globally.” Others are being captured, too, including politicians, university professors, media figures, and members of influential think-tanks and other non-profit organization, who receive lucrative Chinese contracts, sinecures, paid participation in exchange programs, free travel and gifts, and Chinese donations to various causes.

All of these people have potential conflicts of interest, and many of those conflicts have been ignored in bringing some of them into various positions in the Biden administration. These include top cabinet members such as Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to lesser officials such as Jake Sullivan (National Security Advisor), Dr. Yue (Nina) Chen (the chief climate risk officer for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency), Ertharin Cousin (Co-Chair of the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, and Larry Summers (a top Biden economic advisor).

Those potential conflicts of interest with the communist Chinese don’t seem to matter. In fact, perhaps those conflicts could even be a resume enhancement in the Biden administration, by all appearances!

The communists have been practicing elite capture of Americans and others for decades as a means of insidiously influencing political decision-making that affects Chinese interests, goals, and objectives. Elite capture has paid off handsomely for China, for example, the continuation of Most-Favored Nation trade status, favorable visa policies that have enabled a deluge of Chinese nationals to attend US universities and also work in the US, and successes in minimizing US responses to continuing Chinese Communist Party persecution of Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong, and other minorities in China.

The kowtowing to China has gotten so obvious since January 2021 that the administration seems to be willing to overlook almost any Chinese belligerence and aggression in order to reengage with Beijing and reset bilateral trade relations to the conditions that existed before the Trump administration established tariffs to counter hostile Chinese mercantilist trade practices that had been ongoing for decades before 2016.

Consider the recent response to Balloon-gate, during which a Chinese surveillance balloon violated US sovereignty and airspace for over a week while collecting data over ICBM silos and other sensitive US military installations. According to the Wall Street Journal, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink conveyed “the administration’s interest in resuming diplomatic talks with China, with the understanding that U.S. sovereignty wasn’t to be violated” to an envoy at the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC on 9 February.

A callous violation of US sovereignty elicits this tepid response from the Biden administration – the desire to “get back to business as long is it doesn’t happen again”? So much for “tough American diplomacy.”

The only way to deter belligerent conduct is to immediately impose commensurate costs on the aggressor to prevent future incidents. That’s “diplomacy 101” although perhaps what we are witnessing are the long-term effects of Chinese elite capture of the US State Dept and the White House, as well as the personnel policy decisions that seem to ignore conflicts of interest with the CCP.

Joe Biden’s family has benefited personally from past lucrative business agreements with the communists, including a total of $31 million received from 2013-2017 as detailed by the New York Post. Some of that consisted of a $5 million interest-free loan the Biden family received from a Chinese energy conglomerate in 2017 (see here).

Has Joe Biden also been “captured” by the communists? Is that why Biden was prepared to send Secretary of State Tony Blinken to Beijing for bilateral talks with the communists before the bad optics of Balloon-gate nixed that trip? It was bad enough that the trip gave the appearance of a supplicant visiting his masters.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Clues to Biden administration hiring practices can be found in his executive orders that establish LGBTQI and diversity/equity/inclusion priorities throughout the federal government. Identity politics has apparently superseded merit, competition, experience in hiring priorities, and the direct effects are obvious in Executive Branch personnel and policy failures, some of which were identified above.

A glaring hole in the Biden administration’s hiring decision-making process seems to the willful blindness to potential conflicts of interest with the Chinese Communist Party. Such conflicts could adversely impact US policy decisions aimed at deterring China. This bodes ill for America as Beijing continues its belligerent actions worldwide, especially in East and South Asia and the South China Sea.

A return to merit, competency, and experience requirements over all other factors in federal hiring is sorely needed as soon as possible.

The end.