WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - A federal watchdog filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) inspector general against a top deputy of Secretary Miguel Cardona and asked for an ethics investigation.
Protect the Public's Trust alleged in its complaint that DOE Deputy Chief of Staff Donna Harris-Aikens has potentially violated her ethical obligations in continued interactions with the National Education Association (NEA), a national teacher's union.
“Among those interactions that we believe were improper were coordination between the National Education Association, which is her former employer, with respect to the school reopening guidance,” said Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust. “So, that's the allegation that we're making is that she acted improperly in her contacts with a former employer.”
PPT became aware of Harris-Aikens’ communications through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) query.
“We did find indications that the teachers' union had provided information that they would like to have included and provided edits to the documents from the CDC guidance on school reopening during COVID,” Chamberlain said. “Some of that was involved in, or included in the FOIA documents that we received.”
It was widely reported that the CDC was the subject of criticism for allowing teacher's unions to exert undue influence in the development of school reopening guidance.
“One of the things that she did is she reached out to the two main teachers unions, the American Federation for Teachers and the National Education Association, and offered to provide them with a briefing on the day before the school reopening guidance was issued and also leading up to the release of that guidance," Chamberlain told Legal Newsline. "She also communicated with those two unions and offered them an embargoed copy of policy documents."
The hope in giving the unions a sneak peek, according to a PPT press release was to have "both Becky [Pringle] and Randi [Weingarten] plus one or two key staff with the understanding that the conversation, information, etc. is on a strict confidential and embargoed status," the deputy chief of staff wrote in an email.
Harris-Aikens joined the DOE after serving for more than 14 years in a senior leadership role as senior director of education and policy practice for the last 2.5 years at the NEA.
"That's why these conflicts of interest rules and these ethics laws and guidelines are in place is to prevent people who are close to the people in power from using those relationships to exert undue influence on proceedings," Chamberlain added.