A Biden White House official “burrowed” into the permanent career workforce of the Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency, The Daily Wire has learned.
Taylor Carter-Disanto’s LinkedIn profile picture is a photo of her with Joe Biden, and its cover image is a gay pride flag with a black-power fist. But the most remarkable part of her profile is a new job: a career federal government position at the Department of Commerce she says she started in December and will continue through the Trump administration and beyond.
The placement of campaign and White House operatives and political appointees into civil service positions undermines Democrats’ claim that the civil service is sacrosanct and that Trump’s reform initiatives risk “politicizing” it.
Carter-Disanto worked for the Biden campaign, the Biden inaugural committee, and most importantly, the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), which oversees the hiring and placement of political appointees.
In September 2021, she herself was named as a political appointee to the Department of Commerce, which the LGBTQ+ Victory Initiative said was part of its push to put gay activists in government. She previously worked for the LGBT Bar Association.
As Special Assistant to the National Director of the MBDA, the Commerce Department featured her on its website, saying “To truly embrace the complexities and beauty of intersectional identities takes time and introspection, but most importantly an understanding of how we got here. The political and cultural contributions of Black and Brown trans women are deeply relied on for the progression of the LGBTQ+ community.”
After a year in that job, she departed to work for the city of Baltimore as its “Deputy Director, Broadband and Digital Equity,” where she blamed 1960s redlining for the internet in Baltimore being slow.
Her LinkedIn says she ended that job in January 2025, though it says she returned to the Department of Commerce in December 2024 as part of MBDA’s “Strategic Initiatives Group.”
On January 23, she posted to LinkedIn, “I am honored to return to Minority Business Development Agency – U.S. Department of Commerce to continue my passion for enhancing economic prosperity for our country’s dynamic and resilient minority business community.”
She said 2024 brought “hardships” but that she planned to be part of the “solution” through her government job, and closed the post with a picture of her and Joe Biden.
Trump has said the government should not operate “equity” initiatives. But Carter-Disanto’s LinkedIn bio suggests she intends to do just that. She calls herself a “dedicated social and economic equity advocate” and “a policy wonk with a special focus on equity.”
Carter-Disanto did not return a request for comment, nor did the Department of Commerce.
Federal ethics rules deter “burrowing” — the effort to embed political appointees into the next administration — because it could lead to political operatives subverting the next administration, or to a job being taken away from a career employee because Cabinet secretaries give it to a politically connected friend. A political appointee can only be converted to a permanent position with special permission from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
OPM did not return a request for comment on whether, under the Biden administration, it granted such permission for Carter-Disanto.
Carter-Disanto is the second former member of the Biden White House’s Presidential Personnel Office who The Daily Wire found to have joined the non-political federal workforce, suggesting that insider influence on the world of government personnel could have played a role.
Elizabeth Peña was a Biden PPO official and Labor Department appointee who left government to work for the Kamala Harris transition team, likely expecting a big political appointment if Harris won the presidency. Instead, after the election but before Trump’s inauguration, Labor Department officials placed her in an ostensibly non-political job that would not end with the administration.
Like Carter-Disanto, she also said she intended to advance “equity” with the job, and had also worked for the Biden campaign. The Trump administration fired her after the exposé, with the Department of Labor saying it “is actively working to ensure no other political operatives” burrow into the civil service.
The Minority Business Development Agency was created in 1969 via executive order, but was made a permanent agency in 2021 via Joe Biden’s infrastructure law, which funded it at $110 million per year. That had a side effect of making its leader a presidentially-appointed position.
The bill says that the law “shall presume that the term ‘socially or economically disadvantaged individual’ includes any individual who is Black or African American; Hispanic or Latino; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.”
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