A new database will track the careers of former Biden appointees, potentially putting companies who hire Democrats out in the cold with the Trump administration.
The public website will capture politicos who cash in on their government tenure to peddle influence as lobbyists, as well as identifying those who “burrow” into obscure government positions that are ostensibly non-political, potentially thwarting the Trump administration from within. The Daily Wire identified one such case this week, with a former White House personnel office operative implanted into a new position at the Department of Labor that would be uninterrupted by a new president.
The website, InsideBidensBasement.org, could also have an element of revenge: Democrats attempted to destroy the careers of many people who worked for Trump during his first term, getting lawyers disbarred and pressuring major companies not to hire Trump administration alumni. Washington’s conservative happy hours are full of tales of people who occupied high-powered roles in the Trump administration — the kind that would historically lead to no shortage of high-powered career opportunities — instead being unemployed.
The website began early in the Biden administration as an effort to track who was running the government — capturing their ethics disclosures and analyzing their connections to special interests and activist groups. Now it has been repurposed to follow Biden administration officials in their post-government careers.
Many political appointees hold a job for only about two years before leaving, so the website already includes some revolving-door entries. But it will largely fill out in the coming months as Biden’s political appointees find themselves unemployed. The website allows users to search by company, and comes with the implicit threat that administration officials or other influential conservatives might notice when a company has hired many Democrat operatives, and treat them accordingly. That could provide a deterrent to hiring them at all.
“Folks who spent months ‘Trump-proofing’ the Biden administration’s ‘legacy’ will want to stick around and admire their handiwork and chuck a wrench or two in from the outside if they can,” the site says. “Many appointees will use the revolving door to return to the special interests who financially benefited from this administration’s policies – and not just the Chinese, Ukrainian, and Iranian ones. Others will seek to cash out while making grand promises to their new employers about their continued access with resistant career officials and knowledge of how their former agencies will operate.”
But these political appointees don’t have a record that makes them alluring hires, it says.
“Through tracking of where appointees land and which employers hire them with an expectation of benefiting their clients and corporate bottom lines, we will seek to ensure the new administration’s agenda – and the agencies that implement it – are aware of those Biden-connected special interests trying to get in the building,” it adds.
The project is led by Josh Whitehouse, who worked for the Presidential Personnel Office in the first Trump administration. He explained the website’s twofold goal to The Daily Wire.
“President Biden is leaving office with a 36% approval rating and, given what we know about his mental acuity, he didn’t achieve that alone. The people who helped him create runaway inflation, a flood of illegals, a massive increase in violent crime, and all the other conditions that swung the election are going to be turned loose on an unsuspecting public. If I’m donating to an NGO or investing in a company, I want to know if its management has the good judgment to avoid hiring alumni from a failed administration,” he said.
“Most importantly, we want to guarantee alumni are not burrowing into agencies and becoming deep state career bureaucrats, whose sole purpose is to short-circuit the president’s mandate.”
Democrats operate many well-funded nonprofits that serve as “White Houses in waiting” or “Democrat full-employment centers,” which give them cushy jobs and let them keep connections fresh while they plot a return to power — a phenomenon that is not matched on the Right and which might be illuminated by the database. Many will go to sinecures in academia, where they will be quoted as “experts.”
The database shows that four Biden appointees have already popped up at Google. That includes Ali Douraghy, a Department of Energy appointee who is now in charge of making Google carbon-neutral; former White House official Chris Derusha, who’s now Director of Global Public Sector Compliance for Google Cloud; Dayanara Adali Ramirez, a spokesperson for Treasury and now Civics Outreach Manager for Google; and Samiyyah R. Ali, a deputy associate counsel for the Biden administration who’s now working on privacy at Google as well as working for George Washington University.
Four others, including special assistant to the president Kaitlyn H. Demers, have gone to Covington & Burling, the law firm and lobby shop.
Tracking mid-upper-level operatives may land as aggressive or controversial, but it also shows that Trumpworld has moved from simply decrying the “deep state” to mapping it out so they can better combat it. Another conservative group, the American Accountability Project, has gone a step further, tracking career government employees who it believes might thwart their new boss.
American Accountability Project created a “DHS Bureaucrat Watchlist” containing names of important career employees at the Department of Homeland Security, who it says have expressed animosity towards conservative positions including border control, so that an incoming Trump administration could ensure that they do not thwart its initiatives.
“There are a large number of people in the administration who have dedicated their life work to helping migrants settle in the United States,” said the group’s founder, Tom Jones. “These people are not going to do it. They are actually going to undermine it.”
