President Joe Biden promised his children would not have West Wing offices, but his administration has hired a handful of senior aides’ offspring.
And while ethics experts agree White House officials do not appear to have broken any federal rules, they are urging Biden to sidestep even the perception of conflicts of interest, particularly as trust in public institutions is at a low.
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Just because it is “fairly normal” for a White House to tap partners, as well as parents and children, of top aides, that does not mean the questionable practice should be simply overlooked, according to Scott Amey, general counsel for the nonpartisan Project On Government Oversight.
“It should be addressed to ensure that conflicts of interest don’t become equally normalized,” he told the Washington Examiner.
For Amey, Washington’s “swamp” reputation is well deserved, describing the nation’s capital as “a small town” where there are “many instances of family and friends in senior public positions, depending on who is in the White House.”
“The ethics system, however, requires disclosure and firewalls to ensure that cozy relationships don’t interfere with government business. Sometimes, that system works well, and at times it doesn’t, which is why so many people question the integrity of the government and our senior leaders,” he said.
Steven Mintz, a prominent ethics scholar, explained federal law generally prohibits a public official from appointing a family member to “a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control.”
“What this means in ethics is the federal [government] must avoid even the appearance of bias in making decisions and should not have authority over the work done by the hired relative,” he said.
Mintz believes the ethical line is marked by competence and experience.
“If a public official hires a family member to serve in an advisory [role], they should be the most qualified and not gain monetarily, beyond the usual salary, and the public official should not have anything to do with their performance evaluation,” he said.
While not as “pernicious” as corporate lobbying, Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser, whose group examines executive employees, called the White House staff moves legal but “worrisome.” He called them another reason for people to be skeptical of “whether the government is acting on behalf of everyone or some broad vision of what’s right.”
The federal ethics regime, a combination of the anti-nepotism law and conflict of interest regulations, “has not caught up to the reality of American politics in which politics is a family business,” he said. Part of that is because it is based on old gender stereotypes and does not account for children.
“The other problem is that there was a terrible Office of Legal Counsel opinion, that I still feel like has not received enough scrutiny, in January 2017 that enabled Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to work in the White House,” he added of former President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, who were the 45th chief executive’s closest advisers.
Reforms could be rolled out through laws or efforts aimed at returning to a norm “where people are circumspect about the appearance of favoritism for connected people,” Hauser contended.
“It’s possible for talented people to be married to each other or to be the children of influential people. That’s obviously true. I’m not arguing the opposite,” he said. “But I think what I’d like to see is great concern being taken to make sure that hiring decisions are independent of connection and based solely on individual merit.”
The White House onboarded Julia Reed last week as Biden’s day scheduler after she helped the campaign stage events as an advance aide, according to Politico. The former Chicago-based middle school teacher and Teach for America alumna is the daughter of Bruce Reed, Biden’s deputy chief of staff and former President Bill Clinton’s top domestic policy adviser.
Reed joins Steve Ricchetti’s children, daughter Shannon and son Daniel, in the Biden administration. The elder Ricchetti, another Clinton White House deputy chief of staff and former lobbyist, is now a Biden presidential counselor, while Shannon works in the White House Office of the Social Secretary and Daniel is a senior adviser to the State Department Office of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security.
Sarah Donilon was also part of the Commerce Department’s agency review team during Biden’s transition. Her mother is Ambassador Cathy Russell, director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and chief of staff to Jill Biden when she was second lady, while her uncle Mike Donilon is a longtime Biden aide and presidential senior adviser.
Spouses, too, comprise the executive’s upper echelons.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain’s wife Monica Medina, an alumna of former President Barack Obama’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was nominated last month to become assistant secretary of Biden’s State Department Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Science Affairs.
Former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer, husband to Anita Dunn, another presidential senior adviser, was named to Biden’s Supreme Court commission. And Cass Sunstein, head of Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and a senior counselor to Biden’s Homeland Security Department, is married to U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Samantha Power. Power was an Obama United Nations ambassador as well.
Author and historian David Pietrusza quipped that presidents have long kept staffing matters “in the family.” A popular example is the late President John F. Kennedy picking his brother Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general and brother-in-law Sargent Shriver as director of the Peace Corps, according to Pietrusza.
“Well, as they say, it’s all relative,” he said. “Jonathan Daniels served Franklin Roosevelt as a high-level White House [aide] and very briefly as press secretary. His father, Josephus Daniels, wasn’t in the White House but was FDR’s longtime ambassador to Mexico. FDR had served under Josephus in Woodrow Wilson’s Navy department before and during World War I.”
“James Roosevelt, FDR’s oldest son, by the way, served in a variety of White House capacities, including ‘administrative assistant to the president’ and secretary to the president,” Pietrusza added. “John Adams appointed his son John Quincy Adams as ambassador to Prussia.”
Biden vowed during the campaign to build an “absolute wall” between the White House and his family and that his children would not have West Wing offices like the Trumps. He also pledged that his relatives would sign a code of conduct to prevent conflicts of interest, though business dealings from his brothers James and Frank have already proven problematic.
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Frank Biden, for one, featured in an Inauguration Day ad for his Florida law firm, the Berman Law Group, touting his ties to the White House. Joe Biden promoted his son Hunter’s memoir, too, a book that details the younger Biden’s drug addiction issues.
