Is The FTC’s Lina Khan Off The Reservation On Biden’s Tribal Policies?

Washington, D.C. – The latest YouGov poll of Democrats shows just about one-third of Joe Biden’s 2020 voters don’t want him to be the party’s 2024 standard-bearer. It’s not clear if that’s because they think he’s doing a poor job or because they think he’s not up to it. It’s probably a little of both but, for the president and his advisers, it’s a big problem.

The White House political people need to find ways to shore up his support among his base more quickly and effectively than they have been doing. If they don’t, his voters are going to start thinking about other options.

If you haven’t noticed, they’ve been trying for months. The political team at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has been playing up the outreach to minority groups hard because they’ve proven to be his most reliable supporters. Will it work? Perhaps, but only if he follows through on the promises he and his administration are making, explicit and otherwise.

For a politician, there are few things worse than facing an electorate angry over a broken promise. If Biden doesn’t want to find himself in the same place as George H.W. Bush once did, then he needs his team inside the White House to lean hard on his appointees to be sure they’re doing all he promised they would.

It’s not clear they are. Back in November, for example, Biden moved to put some teeth into an executive order Bill Clinton signed, coincidentally enough, just before the 2000 election, probably as a gesture to make nice with Indian Tribal Governments.

The 2022 Biden memorandum – Uniform Standards for Tribal Consultation – is an outline describing ways to improve communications between Native American tribes (who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats in key states like Arizona) and the federal government.

Some agencies may be handling it well. But the folks who have been looking say FTC Chairman Lina Khan apparently hasn’t done anything to bring her agency into compliance with the Biden memo.

Giving the high hat to a White House directive that’s supposed to elevate tribal considerations on regulatory and permitting issues that could also help lock down critical electoral support before the primaries begin is not something a team player would do.

Khan’s caused problems for Biden since he picked her to lead the Federal Trade Commission in March of 2021. She’s got her own agenda and is pursuing it, no matter what anyone, including her fellow commissioners, has to say about it. If she hasn’t done anything to push her agency to improve its communications with tribal organizations it might be because she’s been too focused on blocking or trying to block mergers and acquisitions the progressives don’t like.

Not helping streamline things at the FTC isn’t the only way the Biden administration has failed to address tribal concerns. It didn’t give them much weight either when it suspended, blocked, didn’t approve and limited fossil energy development on public lands. That’s produced tensions the political people would rather not have to deal with.

Among Biden-appointed regulators, Khan may be the most trouble overall. She’s ignored Congress, her critics say, and broken promises made during her confirmation hearings to be transparent about what she was doing. She’s also, according to federal workplace surveys, crushed the morale inside her agency by behaving like a partisan warrior.

Republicans upset by all this want to bring her to heel. The impulse to rein her in may seem right, but they just might think about doing the opposite. Why interfere when she’s driving Biden’s future voters away? By ignoring his memo on tribal considerations, as she appears to have done, she’s poisoning the very relationships it’s meant to foster.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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