Biden’s Partisan Punch at West Point He purges Trump appointees from military academy boards.
The White House this week told Trump appointees to resign or be fired from boards overseeing military service academies, and that is President Biden’s right. But the Biden Administration denies that the military has been compromised by politics even as the President now indulges in acts of petty partisanship in military education.
The Biden Administration asked for resignations from more than a dozen members of the boards of visitors at the U.S. Naval Academy, Air Force Academy and West Point. The boards are roughly akin to the trustees at a college. Members are chosen by the President, Vice President, the Speaker of the House or congressional committees. The President’s nominees serve three-year terms.
The Biden Administration is selling this as removing Trump loyalists installed in sinecures. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said this week that she’d “let others evaluate” whether Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer, asked to leave boards for the Air Force and Naval Academies, respectively, were “qualified, or not political, to serve on these boards.” Mr. Spicer has spent 20 years in the Navy reserves and has a master’s degree from the Naval War College.
But this isn’t merely about replacing a few controversial nominees. The tell is that the White House also booted retired Gens. H.R. McMaster and Jack Keane from the West Point board. Both were eminently qualified Army general officers who influenced President Trump in productive directions. Gen. Keane was a leading architect of the 2007 surge that saved the day in Iraq.
Gen. McMaster taught history at West Point and is winning an alumni award on Saturday. Gen. Keane told us he’d been honored to help and that the board was a collegial group whose advice was better and more steady for the diversity and continuity. His term wasn’t set to expire until the end of next year.
Of note is that these boards haven’t even been able to meet this year. The Biden Administration suspended all Pentagon advisory boards shortly after taking office, pending a review ostensibly aimed at removing members President Trump had appointed at the end of his term. The extended pause has been a disservice to the academies, which could use sound advice amid cheating scandals and culture-war debates over the curriculum.
Jonathan Hiler, a Naval Academy grad and former aide to Vice President Mike Pence who was asked to resign from the Annapolis board, had it right when he said this week that “developing leaders capable of defending our country’s interests at sea,” the mission of the Naval Academy, is “not something that should be consumed by partisan politics.”
The boards of visitors don’t have a profound influence on day-to-day operations, but they report to the President periodically and are a useful check on the direction of the institutions. Americans have good reason to want a diverse set of eyes on what cadets and midshipmen are learning. The academies produce about one-fifth of officers but the mark on leadership and service culture is larger, especially for the Navy. Some 60% of new three- and four-star admirals from 2008 to 2018 were Annapolis grads, according to a Rand analysis.
Mr. Biden has kicked Trump holdovers off everything from arts commissions to obscure regulatory bodies, and the latest round of evictions are par for his non-unifying course. But the precedent means the military school boards may get a partisan ransacking with every new President, which will serve neither the academies nor the country.
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