In the gap between a Presidential election where the office is turned over to a new POTUS, and especially a President from the opposing party, a lot of partisan mischief can be done before the lame duck limps out the door. This is legal, of course: every President has a right to serve four full years. However, when the exiting Chief Executive deliberately acts to throw obstacles in the way of the People’s Choice or lock in policies that the incoming President is certain to oppose, the conduct is unethical in my view. It is giving a metaphorical middle finger to the newly elected President.
Ethics Alarms discussed several instances between the November election and January 20 in which whoever was pulling poor Joe’s marionette strings engaged in particularly egregious examples of this kind of divisive conduct, and more have been uncovered since.
Here’s one that made me do a Danny Thomas spit: In the last days of Biden’s administration, a $89 billion, 25-year grant was awarded by the National Institutes of Health to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research. The nonprofit, which “operate[s] exclusively for the benefit of” the University of California system, according to its tax filings has never raised or spent any money since it was formed in 2022. The new regime at NIH is investigating, as well they might, and the massive grant is likely to be cancelled.
Then there’s the board that oversees the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. On January 17, 2025, “Biden” stacked the Holocaust Museum board with Democrats, appointing Ron Klain, his former chief of staff, Susan Rice, Biden’s director of Domestic Policy Council of the United States, Tom Perez, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Anthony Bernal, who was an advisor to former First Lady Jill Biden, and best of all, Doug Emhoff, whose claim to prominence is that he married Kamala Harris. Trump dismissed all of them last week, but he shouldn’t have had to.
The Axis is always blubbering about “democratic norms”: one norm I would like to see solidly entrenched in tradition is for Presidents ending their term to do nothing that will interfere with the agenda of the leader the electorate has made clear that it wants to shepherd the government. That shouldn’t be too hard.
Ethics Alarms 
Would that also apply to the Midnight Judges appointees that later brought on Marbury v Madison?
Why yes, it would!
Herein is revealed the weakness or fundamental wrongness of governing through executive order and poorly monitored executive agencies. Executive orders (as we’ve seen) can be reversed by executive order, giving the appearance to the public and abroad of whiplash as the two parties wrest the tiller away from each other. No money should go out except at the approval of Congress, but since Congress has relinquished its control of the purse-strings by allocating large chunks of money that executive departments then dispense at their own discretion with no oversight, what should we expect? This is especially true when we consider that these executive agencies will outlast the incoming administration. All they have to do is wait until the new administration is gone and return to business as normal. If we want to end this pushing of money out the door before the upcoming administration can stop it, we have to end these federal agencies.
Carthago delenda est.
Well put on right on target.