Job changes at state colleges aren’t usually national news. But what Spanberger and Virginia Democrats are doing matters well beyond the Old Dominion. Republicans like President Trump and Youngkin keep appointing right-wing partisans to traditionally apolitical roles like university board member and FBI director. These appointments are designed to turn key nonpartisan institutions into apparatuses for the Republican Party.
Republican leaders no longer believe in nonpartisan institutions or nonpartisan appointees chosen for their expertise. So many GOP appointees don’t believe in the true missions of the institutions that they are being put in charge of and aren’t qualified to lead them—and therefore must be removed from these jobs as quickly as possible.
With Trump in office, those board members joined with Trump appointees at the Department of Justice and the Youngkin administration to shift the university right. Trump appointees threatened to cut federal funding from UVA unless it ended diversity and inclusion programs and made other changes, the same playbook they used against schools across the country. The conservative board members at UVA quickly implemented these changes, which were in line with what they and the governor wanted anyway. So UVA president James Ryan was ousted, supposedly for being too pro-diversity; transgender women were banned from university sports; basically any mention of ethnicity or race at the university was eliminated. The Youngkin appointees then rushed to appoint a new president, even after Spanberger had won the election and it was clear she didn’t share Youngkin’s vision for the university.
But that’s Republican governance in 2026—particularly in Washington. Kash Patel is woefully lacking in experience to run the FBI and uses the bureau’s resources to investigate Trump’s enemies, exonerate the president’s friends, and drive the director’s girlfriend’s friends home from parties. At the Kennedy Center, Trump replaced Deborah Rutter, who had run orchestras in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago, with Richard Grenell, a Trump hatchetman with little experience in the arts. After failed U.S. Senate and gubernatorial runs, Kari Lake is running the U.S. Agency for Global Media, sidelining people with real experience in journalism abroad.
Trump has also fired the heads of the National Security Agency and Joint Chiefs of Staff after unusually short tenures to install his own choices. Trump has tried to force Powell to quit early, leading to the totally unprecedented move of the sitting fed chair publicly describing how the administration was threatening him with criminal charges. All indications are that Trump will try to use the appointment of a new Fed chair as a way to pick a person with total fealty to the president, not what’s best for the U.S. economy.
So the next Democratic president will need to clean house. I would prefer that the FBI director, Fed chair, and head of the NSA and other such jobs not be tied to presidential election cycles. But the cat is out of the bag now. Trump has appointed very partisan, unqualified, super right-wing people all over the government. Getting rid of them is the only path to restoring nonpartisan institutions with nonpartisan, deeply credentialed people in top positions.
Spanberger’s only been governor for a week, so we shouldn’t make too much of her early moves. But what she and Jones did on education policy needs to be the standard for Democrats across the country. MAGA Republicans will destroy any institution that doesn’t advance MAGA values. You can either leave them in place and let them destroy institutions or remove them, save the institutions, and deal with bad faith criticism that you are being partisan and political. There is no safe third option. Spanberger made the tough, right choice—and other Democrats should follow her example.
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