Trump Rescinds Biden Order Tracking Misconduct Of Federal Officers. Are We Surprised?

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order rescinding an order issued by former President Joe Biden that established a national database to track misconduct incidents involving federal law enforcement officers.

Or to put that another way: The Trump administration — whose federal immigration officers consistently get caught brutalizing, shooting and even killing protesters, and then lying about who escalated the situation — has decided federal law enforcement officers, such as ICE and Border Patrol officers, don’t need oversight, accountability or even to have their actions monitored and their misconduct documented.

What can go wrong, right?

Before we get deeper into how this move serves as more proof that this is the most corrupt administration in recent history, let’s get into the reason Biden signed this order in the first place.

From CBS News:

The police misconduct database was operational for a little over a year, having launched in December 2023. It was not public. Instead, law enforcement agencies could privately search for information on whether a new hire or officer within their ranks had a documented history of abuse, or of violating department policies or law, for example racial bias or excessive use of force.

It was conceived in an attempt to reduce the problem of so-called “wandering officers” — instances where police who were forced out of their jobs because of substantiated misconduct simply found new jobs at different agencies that would otherwise have no way of knowing their history and the potential risk of arming them with a badge and gun. 

Whether we’re talking about local law enforcement or federal officers, keeping a tab on officers’ history of misconduct and abuses so they can’t just find a job with another department or agency once they’re fired is just common sense, which is why this next tidbit about Biden’s EO might surprise you:

The very idea of a federal police misconduct database was first proposed by Trump’s first administration.

Yes, the whole thing was Trump’s idea, and he even signed an executive order, Safe Policing for Safe Communities (EO 12939), on June 16, 2020.

If there’s one thing Trump loves to do almost as much as blaming his predecessors for his administration’s failings, it’s taking credit for his predecessors’ policies when they produce positive outcomes during his presidency. This would have been one of the rare instances in which he could have actually claimed credit for a good policy enacted by his successor, but instead, he does away with it altogether. What has changed less than six years after Trump signed one of the few EO’s he has signed that was actually worth the piece of paper it was printed on?

The U.S. Department of Justice published a press release, announcing that “agencies can no longer query or add data” to the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database.” The press release didn’t even bother to explain why Biden’s order was bad and in need of revocation; it just gives us a brief history of the original order — curiously omitting the fact that it was first proposed during Trump’s first term — and concludes by reporting that Trump initially revoked Biden’s order on Jan. 20, when he was inaugurated, and that he did so “under EO 14148, Additional Recissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions.” (Yes, “rescission” is misspelled in the press release. On a totally unrelated note, this is the administration that decided the Department of Education needs to be dismantled.)

Yeah — Biden’s EO was a “harmful executive order” because the Trump administration says so, and we’re all supposed to ignore the glaring fact that his administration has spent the last year proving that its federal cops are prone to egregious misconduct, and are demonstrably in need of tracking, oversight, and some semblance of accountability.

One big, corrupt, and incompetent MAGA sham — that’s all this administration has shown itself to be.

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