U.S. media outlet Breitbart News reported Monday (Feb. 15) that the Biden administration broke with historical norms by firing a Trump appointee to a fixed-term independent agency into… One appointee claims in a lawsuit that the early dismissal was illegal. At least one Democrat who supports the Biden agenda says it had to be done because some of the appointees were too white.
It is unprecedented for a new administration to fire members of independent agencies with fixed terms. But the Biden Administration is trying to do so anyway. One Trump appointee to a fixed-term independent agency, Roger Severino, is suing the Biden administration over its decision to terminate his tenure.
Severino’s lawsuit states, “The Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) is an independent body that does not possess any executive authority, and is, in fact, a purely advisory entity that possesses no authority at all, and therefore Biden has no constitutional authority to terminate Mr. Severino or the ACUS. Mr. Severino or any other member of the Executive Council of the United States (ACUS).”
Severino was appointed to the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) for a three-year term, but the Biden administration chose to remove him from office early.
The ACUS is an independent agency of the U.S. government established in 1964 by the Executive Conference Act to study and issue reports on all aspects of administrative procedures and to make recommendations to the president, Congress, specific departments and agencies, and the judiciary on the need for procedural reform, as necessary.
The administration also fired several other Trump appointees to fixed terms, including Jennifer Dickey, Andrew Kloster, Paul Dans, Gibson Worsham and Dan (Epstein).
The removal of independent agency members serving fixed terms is unprecedented. Despite four years of allegations that President Trump is undermining ancient political norms, he has never attempted to remove President Obama’s appointees.
The man leading the purge is Gautam Raghavan, the gay deputy director of the influential Presidential Personnel Office, which handles the hiring and firing of some 4,000 political appointees across the government.
Underlying these efforts appears to be a broader cultural agenda. Calls to fire all Trump appointees are also growing in the two agencies that oversee urban planning in Washington, D.C. – the National Capital Planning Commission and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
These two commissions have jurisdiction over monuments and statues in Washington, D.C., and over the naming of streets, statues and monuments in D.C.
According to John Falcichio, the Democratic deputy mayor of Washington, D.C., one of the reasons these appointees need to leave is because they are too white.
In a letter to the Biden administration, Falcichio complained that “after the Trump appointments, the American Arts Council is composed entirely of white male Trump appointees who support the Trump Administration‘s ill-conceived executive order ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Buildings,’ which is intended to make Washington a mausoleum of neoclassical architecture.”
The Trump Executive Order, which Falchio calls a “mausoleum” for Washington, D.C., is an attempt to move federal architecture away from the much-criticized Brutalist architecture and back to the most iconic architectural styles in Washington, D.C., including the Capitol, the White House and the Jefferson Memorial, all of which are Greco-Roman neoclassical in style.
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