The nation’s plunge into inflation-fueled economic doldrums may be linked to the lack of practical, real-world business experience of many of President Joe Biden’s top officials, a report released Thursday suggests.- Sponsored –
“The United States has the highest inflation rate in four decades. The stock market sell-off has liquidated $10 trillion of wealth. Retirement savings are dwindling. Consumer, small business, and investor confidence are shrinking. There’s widespread concern that America is at best teetering on the edge of a recession and may already be in one. And, in terms of growth, the economy has flatlined,” said The Committee to Unleash Prosperity’s Stephen Moore, principal co-author of Not Ready for Prime Time Players.
A majority of key appointees, the report said, have zero years of business experience.
“Instead of having the best minds in America working on these problems, the president is relying on political and policy stooges who couldn’t make a garden grow, let alone the U.S. GDP,” Moore, an economist, said.
Aside from the president, who earned a law degree from Syracuse University in 1968, was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970 and was elected to the United States Senate in 1972 when he was just 29 years old – Vice President Kamala Harris, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin, Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Cecilia Rouse and Shalanda Young, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, have no previous private sector experience.
The report draws attention to some of the concerns limited prior private sector experience may cause regarding the ability of administration officials to make informed policy decisions. Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Indiana mayor and unsuccessful 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who is now U.S. Transportation Secretary, the authors wrote, “now has oversight over a $1 trillion industry and is the official in charge of dealing with intricate supply chain issues at our ports and other vital parts of our transportation infrastructure. Yet he has virtually no experience in transportation or logistics.”
In formulating their conclusions, the authors of the report looked at 68 top officials in the Biden administration, starting with the president. The list of those whose employment history was examined includes cabinet members, regulatory officials and senior White House aides. Others in key economic policy positions who lack any identifiable business experience include Attorney General Merrick Garland, Climate Change Ambassador John F. Kerry, HUD Secretary Marica Fudge, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Jessica Rosenworcel, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan, Deputy Assistant to the President for Labor and the Economy Seth Harris, Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy Daniel Nornung and Jonathan Kanter, the Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Antitrust.
The report also found:
- The median number of years of business experience of the 68 officials featured in the report is zero.
- The average business experience of Biden appointees is 2.4 years.
- 62 percent of the senior Biden appointees who deal with economic policy, regulation, commerce, energy and finance have no practical experience working in the private sector.
- The majority of the Biden economic/commerce team is made up of professional politicians, lawyers, community organizers, academics, lobbyists and lifelong government employees.
- Only one in eight has extensive business experience.
This is in stark contrast to the Trump administration, which was populated by many senior policymakers with experience in the business world including the president, who spent 45 years in the private sector before choosing to run for office. The average business experience of the members of the Trump Cabinet was 13 years and the median for years of experience was eight.
The study was undertaken, the authors said, to address what it called “growing concerns” that top decision-makers in Congress and the Biden administration lack the basic skill sets and business/management experience and acumen to either oversee a $6 trillion federal government or to regulate the various sectors of the national economy.
“It’s easy to understand why we have the highest inflation in forty years, the economy may have already put America into a recession. Despite the White House claims like record job ‘creation,’ a sizable majority of the country now believes, according to the latest polls, that America is on the wrong track. The people making economic policy have never worked in the real world,” said Moore, who co-authored the study with the committee’s Jon Decker, “Americans are hurting and we need to change course immediately.”
Moore’s analysis is backed by a New York Times/Siena poll released Monday that shockingly showed nearly 80 percent of the American voters surveyed thought the nation was headed in the wrong direction. Just 27 percent of Democrats and a mere 5 percent of Republicans said things were on the right track, putting the numbers at their lowest since the near collapse of the U.S. economy at the end of the Bush administration helped put Barack Obama in the White House.
The “takeaway” from the study, the authors wrote, is the need to consider the qualifications of those making policy as it pertains to their ability to solve the nation’s economic troubles, which are growing more severe by the day.
“Surely, we want our political class to have a diversity of backgrounds. We want lawyers, grassroots activists, those with political and policy experience, scientists, health experts, and academics with required specialties,” Moore and Decker wrote. “But we also want people who have experience running large operations with hundreds and thousands of employees and who understand logistics.”
“We need people at the top rungs of government who have experience dealing with large-scale crises (as we experienced during COVID), and also at least some familiarity with the everyday struggles that businesses have with the government,” they write before concluding “The Biden administration has made ’diversity’ a major goal of its administration. But the one area that is sorely missing in this diversity goal is in attracting talented and experienced men and women from the field of small business, commerce, and finance. When it comes to the government: Ignorance is not bliss.”