Washington, D.C., June 18, 2021: Washington Post reporters Sean Sullivan and Michael Scherer discusses the issue of nepotism within the Biden-Harris administration as being a challenge to a more inclusive government, and interviews Inclusive America’s co-founder Mark Hanis to discuss its further implications.

“On his first day in office, he signed an executive order implementing ethics rules that in key ways went further than the Obama administration’s policies. But nothing in the regulations prevented the administration from hiring people who are related to White House officials.

Mark Hanis, the co-founder of Inclusive America, a group focused on making the government workforce more diverse, said that the hiring of relatives of White House officials highlights a larger problem of transparency in how senior appointments are made.

All political appointees should be hired similar to the way the rest of the world is hired, where it is posted, competitive and transparent,” he said. He pointed to studies that showed that hiring based on preexisting relationships has a tendency to reinforce a lack of diversity, as those recruiting candidates tending to pick people similar in background to themselves.

Unfortunately, with a lot of these political positions, it is relational. It’s more about who you know. he added.”

Read the full article here: A family affair: Children and other relatives of Biden aides get administration jobs

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