Biden Fired A Trump-Appointed Official Who Refused To Resign

According to a report from Mediaite President Joe Biden has quickly decided that should Trump-appointed officials within the U.S. government decide that they won’t be resigning from their posts peacefully and quietly, then the new administration would be all too happy to show them the door in the form of an official termination from their position.

Back in January, President Biden terminated Trump-appointed National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Peter Robb after he refused to step down from his position. And now the next Trump-era official has found themselves on the Biden chopping block.

Mediaite reports that the Trump-appointed general counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Sharon Gustafson, refused to resign from her position quietly when the new administration gave her the option, so President Biden instead fired her.

“Bloomberg Law was first to report Gustafson’s firing Friday, and shared the letter she wrote to Biden. She refuses Biden’s request that she resign, noting that she was appointed to a four-year term,” wrote Marisa Sarnoff. “In her letter, Gustafson also accused the EEOC, under Biden, of undermining her work, saying that her reports on ‘religious freedom’ have been removed from the EEOC website. ‘I can only assume that my resignation would be followed by similar suppression of our work promoting religious freedom,’ Gustafson wrote in her letter.”

Gustafson found herself at the center of national controversy when the EOCC sued the Kroger grocery chain for having their employees wear aprons featuring rainbow-colored hearts. Gustafson’s department deemed the aprons “religious discrimination” because one employee of the grocery chain was allegedly upset over the apparent endorsement of rights for the LGBTQA+ community.

“At the end of the day, you serve at the pleasure of the president,” former EEOC general counsel David Lopez stated. “I think the norm that was violated was that she decided to stay. I’ve never heard of that happening before.”