A former Biden administration official who made it more difficult for agencies to terminate certain grants is now backing several legal efforts to ensure money awarded before President Donald Trump took office keeps flowing to left-wing organizations.
Daniel Jacobson, who was previously general counsel of Biden’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is opposing the Trump administration in cases that seek to restore billions in Biden administration grants from the Department of Education (ED), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He also filed a lawsuit against OMB.
Jacobson’s involvement “raises many questions,” Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. He noted that former government lawyers have “obligations regarding what legal matters they can work on after leaving government service, under both federal ethics law and under professional rules of conduct, particularly as those rules have been adopted by the DC Bar, where Mr. Jacobson is a member.”
“If a government lawyer were to learn client confidences or secrets during his representation of an agency and use such information in litigation against that very same agency, it could very well implicate these ethics obligations,” Chamberlain said. “Although it’s not clear that has happened here, on the face of it, the situation raises many questions.”
Jacobson did not respond to requests for comment.
Hellbound and Down 