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

Michael Chamberlain, Washington Reporter

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 judgments weird.

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.

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.”

PPT has found numerous situations in which the failings of career ethics officials compounded the Biden-Harris administration’s questionable personnel judgments. 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.

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