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Don Moynihan Profile picture
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23 Jan, 11 tweets, 5 min read
A number of Trump appointees have tried to burrow into long-term public service jobs. Biden is firing them, which right wing commentators are trying paint as politicization. The reality is that this is correcting a Trump-era pattern of deprofessionalization. 1/
Lets step back to general principles here: political appointees selected on the basis of ideology are expected to resign when a new President comes into power. Career officials stay. For some positions its a little more complex but that is the basic governing logic. 2/
Trump blurred these basic differences between appointees and career staff. He ran out of time in his effort to turn potentially hundreds of thousands of career officials into appointees, and Biden reversed that policy. A good step to protect competence. 3/ washingtonpost.com/politics/biden…
Thats the big picture stuff, so lets focus on the specific case. The U.S. Agency for Global Media funds International broadcasters. The most famous is Radio Free Europe. Seven months ago a Trump appointee Michael Pack took over. 4/
npr.org/2021/01/22/959…
Pack engaged in extreme politicization of the agency. He hired people without relevant qualifications, stacked advisory boards with ideologues & conspiracy theorists, called reporters "deep state" & interfered in programming and political reporting to push a pro-Trump slant. 5/
Trump loses the election. Still, Pack and his pet board decide they want to keep control of USAGM. So they design contracts that say appointees can only be removed for cause, giving protections akin to a career official despite acting like appointees. 6/ npr.org/2020/12/30/951…
Coates is a political consultant and Trump appointee who needs a job after the election defeat. She was hired to lead Middle Eastern Broadcasting network, part of AGM, despite no real media background and limited Middle East expertise. Started Dec 22. 7/
Biden appoints a journalist with overseas experience - imagine that! - to lead AGM, with instructions to restore integrity. She fires Coates. Coates and supporters are *pointing to the contracts that Pack created to burrow in his ideological picks* to say she can't be fired. 8/
There will be a debate about the legality contracts, but to sum up:
1) Trump appointees engage in unprecedented ideological attack on mission of agency
2) Create contracts to give themselves quasi-career protections
3) Cry foul when they are treated as political appointees 8/
In other words, this is the ultimate "Biden says he wants unity" gag.
"Biden says he wants unity, but he refuses to keep in place a team of unqualified Trump appointees that oppose him and the core mission of their organization."
Follow David Folkenflik if you are interested in this topic. As he implies here, the ideal is to avoid AGM becoming a partisan mouthpiece, which means having leaders with bipartisan confidence. Trump broke that model and Biden has to fix it.

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Don Moynihan Profile picture
24 Jan
This is a long-standing ethical debate - do you choose exit, voice or loyalty under an incompetent leader? - precisely because its very hard to prove the counterfactual. But in this case, the pros of having one of the world's best public health scientists in the room seems clear.
Stopping the President from acting like a jackass or managing the palace intrigues are obviously central in the narratives of political reporting, but perhaps the wrong criteria for evaluating public health officials.
Exactly this - in some cases exit would help draw attention to an issue. But exiting during a pandemic seems incredibly costly if you play a central role in public health (which Fauci does)
Read 5 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
24 Jan
Cool study! A key point in looking at lots of studies of frictions is that sometimes nudges are not enough. Nudges help if the problem is attention or learning costs. But sometimes people need direct help with system characterized by high compliance costs - or a simpler system!
One contribution of the administrative burden literature is (I hope) to move away from a "nudges work" or "nudges don't work" duality, where people line up as being pro- or anti-nudge.
Administrative burdens have different types of costs. Nudges help with some, but not others.
A useful contribution social scientists can make is to identify which type of cost (learning, compliance or psychological) affects program take-up, because that implies different solutions. Sometimes a low-cost text msg works, sometimes you need to scrap and fix a broken system.
Read 5 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
23 Jan
Blanket bans on former Trump officials are excessive. However, it is a perfectly reasonable policy for universities to not give a platform for people who worked to undermine US democracy. washingtonpost.com/education/2021…
Wrote about this the day after the Capitol insurrection, anticipating that universities would communicate to their stakeholders the importance of democracy, while still accommodating people opposed to democracy.
Grennell took active part in Trump's construction of the Big Lie. He held a press conference alleging mass voter fraud in Nevada. The night of the Capitol insurrection he was on Hannity, still pushing the claim of election fraud that drove the mob.
Read 4 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
22 Jan
As David Brooks suggests that academia is a "less vicious" equivalent to white supremacy, just want to point out he was a Yale fellow for six years (where he taught a course on humility!) and pulls down speakings fees from universities that are equivalent to many faculty salaries
David Brooks draws on academia more than most columnists - social science, moral philosophy. He also has written about the deep value of universities to their community. But he is addicted to the causal wide swipes at faculty where to retain his conservative bona fides.
For example, there has been a long conservative critique of the humanities as essentially useless. Brooks, who draws on the humanities a lot, rather than defends it, argues that it has simply become to woke.
Read 6 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
22 Jan
.@willwilkinson is one of the better follows on this site. He made a satirical point about the bad faith nature of Biden’s critics, which bad faith actors used as a campaign to get him fired. It hurts the credibility of @NiskanenCenter to go along with such obvious BS.
For all the criticism of campus intolerance, it remains true that espoused academic freedom values are usually enough to give the org leaders the spine not to go along with contrived campaigns to fire employees for speech issues. Not so for most other places of work.
You can read the background, including Will’s explanation and apology here. Did a single person who actually think this was a serious call to violence?
Read 4 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
21 Jan
We are 2 weeks from a guy wearing a Camp Auschwitz hoodie storming the Capitol, and even Trump's DHS labeled white supremacists as our biggest domestic threat.

But by mentioning white supremacy Biden is "divisive" and attacking whites.
Welcome to the next 4 years of gaslighting.
If a guy spends 20 minutes saying we are good people, we need unity and then says, "but we can't tolerate white supremacists" and your response is to be offended, then maybe the problem is with you.
Good summary of the bad faith media effort trying to persuade all whites that Biden's criticism of white supremacy is actually an attack on them. Via @pbump washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
Read 4 tweets

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