FTC Inspector General Reprimands Lina Khan for Hiring Unpaid ‘Experts’

The FTC under Lina Khan has been reprimanded by the agency’s inspector general for bringing in unpaid “experts” and consultants, creating potential legal and compliance risks including conflicts of interest.

The lack of formal employment contracts allowed Khan’s FTC to avoid the usual checks and balances involved in hiring federal officials, creating the opportunity for leftist Khan to bring in radical progressives.

According to the inspector general’s audit of the FTC, obtained by Bloomberg News, the agency had no clear process for bringing in unpaid consultants.

Via Bloomberg:

“Without formal agreements, the FTC has unnecessary exposure to operational, legal, compliance, and reputational risk,” the audit found, pointing out that decisions based on consultants’ work could be invalidated or cause other problems for the agency because they aren’t full- or part-time federal employees.

The report also found that the agency had no clear process for recruiting or integrating the unpaid consultants and experts. The audit recommended the agency adopt policies within 60 days for when it will make use of unpaid workers, how they will be selected and deployed within the agency, and take steps to ensure they aren’t doing work that requires full-time government employees.

In documents used to justify bringing on the consultants, the FTC said several of the individuals would “play an integral role in the commission’s strategic direction,” the audit found, and many would have a “wide latitude of responsibility.”

Breitbart News previously reported on the radical hiring decisions of Khan’s FTC, including one of the most far-left former employees of Google, Meredith Whittaker. Whittaker is a progressive radical who worked on “machine learning fairness” at Google, the field that blends the racist assumptions of Critical Race Theory with computer science.

An outspoken political partisan, Whittaker successfully pressured the company into shutting down an AI ethics board over its inclusion of the establishment conservative Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.