A number of officials in the administration of President Joe Biden have been nabbed for holding federal jobs in violation of the law.
The Government Accountability Office has said in five reports that people who hold “acting” titles before permanent people have been found for those jobs have held their positions too long, in violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, The Daily Wire reported.
“The positions include a member of the Office of Management and Budget, the Assistant Secretary of ICE, and a top official in the Department of Justice”, it said.
“The Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 ‘establishes requirements for temporarily filling vacant positions in Executive Branch agencies that require presidential appointment and Senate confirmation’, the GAO reports on its website. ‘This act identifies who may temporarily serve, for how long, and what happens when no one is serving under the act and the position is vacant.’ The GAO, an agency of the legislative branch, issues letters to the president and Congress to report violations of the law”, it said.
The Daily Wire reported:
The officials who have stayed in their position beyond the limits of federal law are:
Deidre Harrison, the acting Controller of the Office of Federal Financial Management within the White House Office of Management and Budget;
Allison Randall, the acting Director of the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women;
Tae D. Johnson, the acting Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE);
Karen Freeman, Craig Hart, and Ann Marie Yastishock, all of whom served as the Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Asia within the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID);
Charlotte A. Dye, the acting General Counsel of the Federal Labor Relations Authority
Positions that require Senate confirmation are to be held by an “acting” official for 210 days. It can be extended for 90 days when a new president is inaugurated which would be a total of 300 days.
The president can nominate someone to fill the position who would be “an individual serving in another PAS position; or a senior agency officer or employee who has served for a minimum period of time prior to the vacancy”.
The president has gotten this news after he had an eventful week.
President Joe Biden was caught on a hot mic after the State of the Union address to the nation where he said something that caught the attention of many. After his speech on Tuesday, as he was leaving the joint session of Congress when he spoke to NJ Sen. Bob Menendez about Cuba.
“Bob, I gotta to talk to you about Cuba”, the president said to the New Jersey senator.
“OK”, the senator said incredulously.
“I’m serious”, the president said in the video that caught the attention of Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
“It looks like Biden wants to talk to someone about #Cuba”, the senator said.
It looks like Biden wants to talk to someone about #Cuba pic.twitter.com/RO7r8xP0zI
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 8, 2023
The New Jersey senator has been at odds with the Biden administration on several occasions over Cuba, who Sen. Menendez has had a hardline stance against.
In May, 2022 Senator Menendez broke from president Biden when the president relaxed restrictions on group tours to Cuba, The New Jersey Globe reported.
“I am dismayed to learn the Biden administration will begin authorizing group travel to Cuba through visits akin to tourism”, he said. “To be clear, those who still believe that increasing travel will breed democracy in Cuba are simply in a state of denial. For decades, the world has been traveling to Cuba and nothing has changed”.
“From Tehran to Havana to Pyongyang, history shows us negotiations based on unilateral concessions have a failed track record of producing actual changes to the behavior of authoritarian regimes”, he said. “Giving Maduro a handful of undeserved handouts just so his regime will promise to sit down at a negotiating table is a strategy destined to fail”.
As President Joe Biden prepared to give his second State of the Union address Tuesday evening, he likely noticed not all of the US Supreme Court justices were present for his speech. Reports on Wednesday noted that four of them skipped the event.
In opening his address, the president greeted five justices — John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — but Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, and Neil Gorsuch did not attend.
It’s not clear at this point why they skipped out on the SOTU.
“The story of America is a story of progress and resilience”, Biden said to begin his address after recognizing Brown Jackson, whom he nominated. “Of always moving forward. Of never giving up. A story that is unique among all nations. We are the only country that has emerged from every crisis stronger than when we entered it. That is what we are doing again”.
