This is completely humiliating:
The White House is removing the Interior Department’s chief of staff, Jennifer Van der Heide, who recently planned a 50-person indoor party at the agency that the White House ordered canceled, and is moving her to a senior counselor job at the agency, according to two Biden administration officials.
The White House’s Cabinet affairs office ordered that party, which was intended to celebrate Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s confirmation, to be called off amid fears it could become a superspreader event, as POLITICO first reported late last week.
You never want your name mentioned in this context in a national news organization’s article. What this incident shows, however, is that the Biden Administration isn’t fooling around. If you do something stupid that is contrary to their messaging and force them to clean up after your mess, they’re not going to let it slide. It’s a “tough-but-fair” way of policing the executive branch, and it’s wise to send a strong message right at the outset, within the first 100 days.
They didn’t go absolutely crazy and fire Ms. Van der Heide. After all, her sin was committed with good intentions. In normal times, a party would be appropriate to celebrate the first Native American to head the Interior Department. These are not normal times, however, and it was poor judgment to plan an indoor gathering of fifty people.
I feel badly for Van der Heide, but her example will be beneficial for the administration as a whole. It’s refreshing after watching the unchecked graft of the Trump administration.
