How Biden’s ‘Incompetent’ Health Secretary Caused a Child Labor Crisis
POTUS is still hesitant to go off Xavier Becerra due to his Spanish heritage.
What’s happened: Xavier Becerra, the embattled Health and Human Services secretary, was implicated in a damning New York Timesreport on the Biden administration’s failure to stop the widespread exploitation of immigrant children.
What they’re saying: Becerra has been described as an “incompetent and out to lunch” health secretary—a role for which he lacks the “relevant qualifications.” The Times report appears to confirm this view.
The Health and Human Services Department was repeatedly informed by seasoned government employees and outside companies, including in stories that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that kids appeared to be at risk.
According to the law, donors must be vested by the Department of Health and Human Services in order to ensure that they will safeguard children’s’s safety from abuse or prostitution. However, as more children moved into the shelters, the ministry started loosening some assessing restrictions and pleading with case managers to move the process along more quickly.
According to reports, at least five Health and Human Services employees filed claims and claimed they were fired for raising misgivings about child safety.
A group of HHS individuals wrote in a letter to their bosses earlier this year,” We are pulling man out of” Health and Human Services.”
Warnings ignored: “I feel like short of protesting in the streets, I did everything I could to warn them,” said Jallyn Saulog, the HHS official formerly in charge of the department’s response to unaccompanied migrant children. “They just didn’t want to hear it.”
After Saulog complained to the agency’s’s domestic guardian, HHS promoted her to a new position in 2021.
Why it matters: It’s another scandal that raises serious questions about Becerra’s capacity to serve as health secretary. He has also been criticized for “passive” and “low profile” leadership styles, as well his botched handling of COVID-19 and the monkeypox outbreak of 2022.
Affirmative inaction: Becerra almost certainly would have been fired by now if he wasn’t Hispanic. The Washington Postreported in January 2022 that White House officials were “loath” to get rid of him because they feared “the ire of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other grass-roots groups that pressed Biden to appoint more Latinos to his Cabinet.”
New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns revealed that some Democrats thought Becerra was a “baffling” choice for health secretary when Biden was assembling his cabinet. It was actually a “panicked” and “hasty” pick by an administration attempting to “calm” dissent from Hispanic lawmakers and assemble “the most diverse cabinet in history.”
Ron Klain, the chief of staff for Biden, grew” tired” of the Democratic coalition’s’s insistence on” treating the cabinet as an identity – politics Rubiks Cube” throughout the” fraught” nominating process, which was characterized by” hurt feelings and ] racial ] grievance ,” according to Martin and Burns report.
Some context: A former congressman and state attorney general, Becerra had at least some relevant experience before Biden nominated him for health secretary. In 2018, for example, Becerra sued the Little Sisters of the Poor in order to compel them to pay for employee contraceptive coverage despite their stated religious objections.
" Conservative News Daily does not always share or support the views and opinions expressed here; they are just those of the writer."
*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases
Now loading...