One of former President Shitbag Von Nunu’s best traits was that he was notoriously bad at the mundane shit. Instead of hiring people who were qualified in their respective fields, Von Nunu placed an emphasis on loyalty over everything. In turn, he put people who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing into powerful positions. When the former president lost the election, many of those appointees and members of his cabinet resigned, and those who didn’t are learning that the new president, Joe Biden, didn’t come here to play games.
Only hours into his new gig, Biden came in giving the axe to Trump holdovers who didn’t want to leave.
I’m not sure how Biden went about actually firing each of the grossly under-qualified idiots, but I like to think that he called them into the Oval office one by one, told them they were trash, then a trap door opened underneath them and off they went.
First up to have his ass handed to him was Michael Pack. Pack was confirmed to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media in June and tried to turn the agency, “which oversees the international broadcaster Voice of America, into a propaganda outlet for Trump—despite a statutory mandate that prohibits such political interference,” Slate reports.
“He purged the staff of VOA and its sister networks, replaced them with Trump loyalists, demanded pro-Trump coverage, and unconstitutionally punished remaining journalists who did actual reporting on the administration. In a perverse move, he refused to renew visas for foreign reporters who covered their home countries, subjecting them to retribution by authoritarian regimes. Pack also illegally fired the board of the Open Technology Fund, which promotes international internet freedom, and replaced them with Republican activists,” Slate noted.
The news site also notes that Pack was only eight months into his three-year position when he was promptly asked to GTFOH.
The second Trump appointee to get booted from the building was Kathleen Kraninger, “who was confirmed as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2018,” Slate reports.
“Kraninger, who had no previous experience in consumer protection, immediately tried to undermine the agency’s role as a watchdog for the financial sector. She scrapped a landmark rule that restricted predatory payday lending, pressuring staff to downplay the resulting harm to consumers. And she refused to enforce a federal law that protected military personnel against a broad range of predatory lending.”
And get this: In a pandemic, Kraninger “approved a rule that allows debt collectors to harass Americans with limitless texts and emails demanding repayment.”
Lastly, Biden told Peter Robb, the National Labor Relations Board general counsel, to either get down or lay down. He could either voluntarily resign or he would be fired.
Despite running the NLRB, which “was created to enforce federal laws that guarantee workers the right to form a union and bargain collectively,” Robb didn’t fuck with unions and he actively worked to kneecap employees who wanted to unionize. Robb’s tenure would end in November, and he announced Wednesday that he wouldn’t be stepping down, so Biden laid his ass off.
Slate notes that this is just the beginning as Trump spent his entire time in office packing the federal government with loyalists who were “eager to undermine the missions of the agencies they led.” Because that makes sense when you don’t care about the country you were elected —and by elected, I mean, Russians toying with the election to ensure your victory—to run.