It was an unspoken deal for generations of presidential hopefuls. A well-connected person helps get you elected, and in return, you make that person an ambassador somewhere exotic as a token of your gratitude.
It was a practice that Joe Biden, then a candidate seeking to court progressives skeptical of his campaign, pledged to end. More than two years into his administration, however, Biden appears to have all but abandoned that pledge.
According to a newly released report by the nonpartisan government watchdog Campaign Legal Center (CLC), Biden has not only continued the bipartisan practice of rewarding deep-pocketed donors with ambassadorships but embraced it, with nearly all of the United States' chief foreign policy representatives abroad among the top contributors to Democratic causes over the past decade.
It's a sharp departure from where Biden was on the campaign trail in Iowa in 2019, when he told reporters the practice of cash for influence would die under his administration, and that merit—not influence—would determine who would play the front for America's presence abroad.
"I'm going to appoint the best people possible," Biden said at the time. "Nobody, in fact, will be appointed by me based on anything they contributed.
Still, he added, "you have some of the people out there...that are fully qualified to head up everything from being the ambassador to NATO to be ambassador to France...who may or may not have contributed."
But he insisted those contributions "would not be any basis" for his decision.
It's a common practice for presidents of both parties. Former President Barack Obama tapped 31 major donors from his reelection campaign to serve as ambassadors at the end of his tenure in the White House, while a record-breaking 44 percent of former President Donald Trump's ambassadors were considered "political" appointments, typically going to major donors.
But while Biden, like other candidates in the field at the time, did not rule out giving donors ambassadorships while on the campaign trail, he hasn't exactly bucked the trend, either. According to totals maintained by the American Foreign Service Administration, 39 percent of Biden's ambassadorial appointments were "political" appointments. And nearly all, the CLC report argues, bought their way in.
According to the report, all but one of the 55 non-career ambassadors his administration has appointed were donors either to his campaign or other Democratic causes over the past decade, with the total number of donations contributed either by them or their spouse averaging upwards of $400,000 per person.
And in many instances, many of those Biden picked to fill those roles lacked the qualifications outlined under U.S. law to occupy the post.
While federal law stresses the posts should normally go to career members of the U.S. Foreign Service, many of Biden's handpicked selections for ambassadorships lack any foreign policy experience at all, while some reportedly do not know the language of the country in which they are stationed.
That lack of expertise, researchers with the CLC said, only serves to undermine American credibility abroad.
"The U.S. is unusual among other Western democracies in appointing political donors to be ambassadors regardless of qualifications," Roger Wieand, senior researcher at Campaign Legal Center and one of the report's co-authors, told Newsweek in an emailed statement.
"That other countries think our high-ranking diplomats may have bought their positions diminishes the credibility of U.S. anti-corruption efforts abroad. The Biden administration has maintained the status quo of the donor-to-ambassador pipeline, which could be deleterious for foreign relations."
Newsweek reached out to the White House Press Office and the U.S. State Department via email for comment.
The Biden White House has attracted scrutiny for its appointments before. Days into his administration, his campaign faced bipartisan backlash after deleting a lengthy list of major donors from its website, a move critics said would allow him to shield his administration from scrutiny as he began the process of selecting ambassadors to represent the United States abroad.
And while some of those nominees have foreign policy experience—Biden's pick for U.S. ambassador to Japan, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, for example, once served abroad as a national security adviser to Obama during his time in the White House—many others on that list do not.
And often, the quality of candidate declines the more money they give.
Biden's nominee to serve as U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman—who once compared journalists to sexual predators—is a major donor to Biden's campaign and a former corporate executive at firms like eBay and Hewlett-Packard. She was also the 2010 Republican nominee for California governor who notably crossed party lines to speak on Biden's behalf at the Democratic National Convention in 2020.
Despite inheriting a the role of fostering relations with a country in political upheaval, the certificate of competency Whitman submitted to members of the Senate ahead of her confirmation did not mention any expertise or experience in Kenya, or even the African continent.
Deep-pocketed Texas lawyer Marc Stanley was tapped by Biden to serve as ambassador to Argentina to replace a 37-year veteran of the Foreign Service at a time of immense instability in the region despite Stanley having no documented knowledge of the Spanish language at the time of his nomination.
Another major fundraiser for Biden's campaign, Comcast lobbying executive David Cohen and his wife, contributed $1.35 million to Democratic committees in the decade before Biden nominated him as the U.S. ambassador to Canada. Notably, the U.S. Department of State failed to note Cohen having any diplomatic or foreign policy experience.
At a time of high-stakes presidential politics and soaring campaign costs, the increasing prevalence of this "pay to play" approach to foreign policy, the CLC argued, is potentially serving to degrade U.S. credibility abroad at a faster rate than ever.
"A past study of decades of ambassador appointments suggests that the qualifications of political ambassador appointees have declined as their contributions have increased in size," the report concluded, "meaning that the soaring cost of presidential elections is effectively degrading the quality of U.S. diplomatic representation."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more
