Peter Navarro: ‘Joe Biden Should Have Known Better’ than to Slash Pensions for 20K Delphi Workers

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro says Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden “should have known better” than to sit by and watch pensions get slashed for about 20,000 Delphi workers.

In 2009, as part of the Obama-Biden administration’s taxpayer-funded bailout of General Motors (GM), the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) terminated the pension plans of about 20,0000 non-unionized Delphi workers. In some cases, workers had their pensions gutted by 30 to 70 percent.

A federal report in 2013 detailed that the Delphi workers would likely have their pensions cut by an estimated $440 million. Meanwhile, GM topped off unionized Delphi workers’ pensions at a cost of about $1 billion.

This week, officials with President Donald Trump’s administration confirmed he is reviewing plans to restore the pensions to the roughly 20,000 Delphi workers who have struggled to win their case in the courts over the last decade.

In an interview with the Dayton Daily News, Navarro said it is a “likely scenario” that Trump will sign an executive order to have the Delphi pensions restored:

“It’s just a flat-out injustice to the Delphi salaried retirees,” Navarro said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon.

…

“You have a situation where, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., has the money.” he said. “This does not require a congressional appropriation, and it doesn’t hurt the taxpayer in any way. There is money at the PBGC.”

Navarro said Biden, now running against Trump with his vice presidential pick Kamala Harris, should have never allowed the pension-slashing to have occurred.

“Joe Biden should have known better,” Navarro told the Dayton Daily News. “Obama, he was a novice as president. But Joe Biden had 40 years of history of off-shoring American jobs.”

As Breitbart News reported, Biden has long sought to downplay the devastation that thousands of Delphi workers experienced amidst the Obama-Biden administration’s bailout of GM. In 2012, for instance, Biden said most of the Delphi workers “did fine.”

“Some of them got hurt,” Biden said. “The vast majority, because of the federal pension board they have out there to make up differences when companies go under like this, most did fine.”

Although Biden, and Obama’s White House, continued to claim that they had little-to-nothing to do with the Delphi workers having their pensions slashed, federal communications say otherwise.

In 2012, federal documents unveiled how the Obama-Biden administration’s Treasury Department worked to gut the pensions of the Delphi workers. In other emails, PBGC officials indicated they had the green light from the Obama-Biden administration to slash the pensions.

Delphi, which has since split into Aptiv and Delphi Technologies, announced in 2006 that it would shutter 21 of its 29 plants in the United States — offshoring some 20,000 U.S. jobs to Mexico, China, and other foreign countries.

At the time, Delphi employed nearly 50,000 Americans who earned about $30 an hour on the assembly line. Now, workers in Mexico for the company earn about $1 an hour.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.