The Rachel Levine Administration

By Jack Butler

Sunday, January 12, 2025

 

Joe Biden is spending the final weeks of his presidency desperately trying to forge a positive legacy. But one of his appointees may have already helped define it for him.

 

In the final, pathetic weeks of his failed presidency, Joe Biden has been casting about desperately for a positive legacy. He has liberally distributed pardons and commutations, as well as presidential medals of freedom. He has leaned on progressives, whose ego-inflating counsel helped destroy his presidency, to rescue its historical reputation. And he and his allies have retailed counterfactuals about how the Afghanistan withdrawal was a success, and how he would have won the 2024 election if he had run instead of Kamala Harris, his vice president.

 

We do not yet know how history will treat the Biden interruption of Donald Trump’s two non-consecutive terms. Hence Biden’s frantic efforts at self-definition. But one Biden administration figure already serves as a convenient distillation of what his presidency unleashed on America and may bequeath as his legacy: Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine, assistant secretary of health and human services (HHS). A recent NPR interview with Levine reminds us of the foibles, follies, and fallacies that have marked his last few years of public service, which are also illustrative of the Left’s recent travails.

 

That Levine took to NPR for this valedictory conversation is instructive in itself. It is yet another sign of the leftist siloing that those within the silo wrongly thought powerful enough to brute-force Harris into the White House. Within the comforting confines of such an interview, Levine is fully allowed to be the “true authentic self” he says transitioning has liberated him to be. He has “a friendly, low-key personality and a pragmatic sensibility,” “loves Joni Mitchell,” and brings “lunch from home — today, it’s a turkey wrap,” the interviewer informs us, before revealing that he “was excited about a new campaign promoting childhood vaccines.” Why the excitement? “Vaccines are incredible, she continues, and explains how she’s seen that firsthand.”

 

NPR listeners learn that Levine is a “pediatrician with a specialty in adolescent medicine who was a public health official in Pennsylvania before being nominated to serve in the Biden administration.” They do not learn that his time in the Pennsylvania role, as state health secretary, was marked with controversy. Pennsylvanian Terry Tracy recounted this sordid history for National Review shortly after Levine entered the Biden administration. Levine ordered all nursing-care facilities to accept individuals with Covid-19. By the time of his swearing in, Tracy writes, “Pennsylvania had surpassed 12,500 nursing-home deaths and was the largest state where nursing-home and care-facility deaths account for over 50 percent of statewide COVID fatalities.” All this while he removed his own 95-year-old mother from a nursing home. Levine’s parting incompetence even failed the vaccines he cares so much about, leaving to his successor in the role a Covid vaccine distribution program widely acknowledged to be compromised.

 

Once confirmed in an HHS position, Levine became the latest symbol used by the progressive commanding heights of culture to advance the most radical claims of the transgender movement. That effort had been advancing in its present form for roughly a decade. But with Levine, it reached new heights of absurdity. Secure among its Himalayas is USA Today’s 2022 decision to name Levine one of its “women of the year.” Receiving the award, Levine was asked to give “transgender, nonconforming or questioning people” advice. Consistent with his recent remarks to NPR, he counseled, “be true to yourself,” “be who you are,” and “then everything else will follow.” It is the happy-sounding flip side of the worldview that treats transgender identification as an existential question, encouraging distressed youth to put their very lives on the line for the sake of affirmation.

 

But Levine’s role was, unfortunately, far more than symbolic. Within HHS, he worked, in policy and rhetoric, to advance transgenderism. References to medicalized gender transition as “life-saving“ were consistent with his tacit endorsement of affirmation-based extortion. But claims that there was “no argument” among medical professionals about the need for such care became increasingly untenable as evidence, though already extant, mounted throughout Biden’s time in office. To maintain the fiction that there was no debate, Levine simply tried to will it so by pressuring the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to drop the age limits for such treatments. This, even as Levine expressed gratitude for his own late transition, as it allowed him to have children — a possibility treatments he advocates often preclude for those who undergo it as minors.

 

In one person, then, you can see the failures of progressive governance during Covid, the absurdities of progressive cultural hegemony, and the depravities of progressive political posturing and policy. Truly, Rachel Levine contains multitudes. And none of it was implied by Joe Biden’s supposed return-to-normal 2020 presidential campaign. Thanks to figures such as Levine, Biden’s presidency assumed an ideological extremism that made Donald Trump look sane and stable by comparison. Levine himself may have played a direct role in this: Trump’s campaign featured him in the “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you” ad widely credited for boosting Trump’s 2024 electoral fortunes. This fact inspires no self-examination in Levine. “It was very challenging, but I’m a resilient person and I’m fine,” he tells NPR. In one person, then, you can also see how the Left reached its current, defeated — yet not humbled — state, despite (and because of) all the faith it placed in its cultural apparatus.

 

In this stubborn clinging to obvious unreality, Levine is a fitting representative of Biden’s governance. Biden is spending his final days in office trying to create a new reality that will, he thinks, guarantee him favorable treatment by posterity. Levine’s record is only one piece of evidence he will have to overcome in making the case that his presidency was more than an interstitial failure. He is likely to be as successful at that as he was at other tasks he set out to do as president.