Only Joe Biden would have kept all of his campaign promises and worked as hard as possible to fulfill his promise to be the most union friendly president in history.
On Wednesday, Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released incontrovertible evidence that officials within the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — which holds itself up as the dispassionate voice of hard science — coordinated the agency’s guidance on reopening schools to in-person learning with the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions.
Based on Fox News:
“In the interim report … Republicans wrote that emails between the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the White House, and the CDC showed that the AFT’s ‘cozy relationship with the Biden administration’s political leadership at the CDC positioned the union to impose line-by-line edits’ to the reopening guidance, despite the CDC’s ‘past practice to keep draft guidance confidential.’ ”
The report also exposes how the administration brushed aside similar revelations when emails surfaced last October revealing that AFT and the National Education Association received a copy of the CDC’s recommendations before they were released to the public.
In fact, union operatives were not only informed about the CDC’s deliberations but were given a role in helping to formulate its final conclusions. According to the report, AFT’s senior director of health issues, Kelly Trautner, emailed CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky asking her to insert the line, “In the event high-community transmission results from a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, a new update of these guidelines may be necessary.”
“The facts are clear,” the report concludes. “Biden’s CDC overrode routine practice to allow a radical teachers union that donated millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns to bypass scientific norms and rewrite official agency guidance.”
While completely outrageous, the allegations should come as a surprise to no one who has watched carefully as the president has all but elevated organized labor to the status of government’s fourth branch.
Among the other lowlights of Biden’s single year in office, the president:
- fired Peter Robb, the Trump-appointed general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, immediately upon taking office despite Robb’s four-year term not having been completed;
- His Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PROL) was unveiled. This would give organized labor a Christmas gift of all things, such as the removal of right-to work laws in private sector unions within 27 states.
- The bill proposes an infrastructure funding bill that contains provisions to designate labor union officials on boards and advisory committees as well as requirements that grant applicants work with labor organizations. Federal agencies are required to consult labor unions regarding infrastructure plans. Funding for union training programs is also available. Wage requirements are based on union wages.
- expanded the COVID-relief “loans” to unions originally ineligible to receive them.
That an administration is willing to let its union benefactors have the keys to the Treasury should not be taken lightly and allow them to make actual policy, it’s not surprising.
What we know now about the disastrous effects of school closings on learning outcomes and their physical health is a wake-up call. However, the latest bid to subjugate political science to hard science must still be shocking.
Ashley Varner, Vice President Communications and Federal Affairs for Freedom Foundation. www.FreedomFoundation.com
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