President Joe Biden’s administration has staffed former labour union officials in senior positions after relaxing rules preventing them from communicating with the large unions they used to work for, it has been revealed.
The Biden administration granted waivers to two former union officials in February and March and has claimed that the waivers were needed and in the public interest for them to carry out their job functions.
Axios revealed that the two officials who received the waivers were Alethea Predeoux and Celeste Drake.
The outlet reported that the move has been slammed as hypocritical by critics who maintained that the union boss appointments have resulted in anti-worker policies.
The waivers also come after former President Donald Trump in his closing weeks in office had revoked a policy that included a five-year ban on former government officials lobbying their former agencies, opening the door in reverse.
Alethea Predeoux, a senior official in the Office of Personnel Management, had been the top lobbyist for the American Federation of Government Employees which is a union representing 700,000 federal workers.
A March 15 memorandum on the waiver from the office’s general counsel Lynn Eisenberg read that Althea Predeoux had been a registered lobbyist for AFGE for six years and that before joining AFGE, she served for about five years as a registered lobbyist for Paralyzed Veterans of America.
The memorandum read that while she has lobbied on the Hill on OPM related matters, she’s not directly lobbied OPM and that if Althea Predeoux hadn’t been granted the waiver, then Joe Biden’s ethics pledge would have prohibited her from working on matters on which she lobbied.
Axios also reported that the Biden administration then issued a similar waiver for Celeste Drake, the head of the White House’s new Made In America Office, in April.
The memorandum for Celeste Drake read that they were expected to advise and counsel the President, the Director of OMB, and other Federal Agencies on international trade, federal procurement, manufacturing and other matters of national and international interest.
Absent this waiver, and they would be restricted for two years following their appointment from interacting with their previous employers, the Director’s Guild of America and the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations, except if those organisations took part in a public event, and without a waiver, Celeste Drake would also be banned from working on matters for which she lobbied in the two years before her appointment.
And how does one waive ethics exactly? It’s either ethical or it’s not, but not all American’s can complain because millions of them voted for this! And there’s simply are no ethics in American politics, but perhaps Joe Biden is clueless on what waivers have been issued or who’s been hired – he’s obviously not running the show, and now we’ve gone from Donald Trump to puppet Joe Biden.
And it seems that ethics are very bendable to the Biden administration – in fact, all words are bendable, which makes them unimaginably dangerous, and it seems to be a dirty dirty administration, whoever is running the show.
