Abigail Spanberger’s First Move as Virginia Gov. Was a Masterstroke

Even before taking office last Saturday, new Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, demanded and received the resignations of several of her Republican predecessor Glenn Youngkin’s appointees to the board that oversees the University of Virginia. In a similar vein, the state’s new attorney general, Democrat Jay Jones, forced out legal counsels at George Mason University and the Virginia Military Institute who were appointed by his Republican predecessor.

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. 

Democrats can’t leave these people in place. The next Democratic president must follow Spanberger and Jones’s examples and fire unqualified hacks that Trump has put into critical nonpartisan positions, particularly if the president eventually replaces Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with someone who will do the GOP’s bidding even if it doesn’t make economic sense. (Powell’s term ends in May.) 

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. 

What’s happened over the last year at the University of Virginia is one of the clearest examples of the GOP’s destructive plans for nonpartisan institutions, and something Spanberger had to address. Conservatives have long viewed elite colleges like UVA as too liberal. They became enraged over the last few years as UVA, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson, incorporated more information about Jefferson’s slaveholding into student-led university tours. Youngkin, elected in 2021, had been aggressively adding super-conservative figures with little education policy experience to the boards at UVA and other public universities in the state. 

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. 

And even without any Trump involvement, the UVA board shut down the tours that were insufficiently pro-Jefferson. How to discuss Jefferson, diversity and equity programs, and much of what a university does and stands for is connected to broader political issues. There is no way to completely remove ideological considerations from the operations of a huge college. But what’s happened over the last year is an ideological and partisan takeover of the school. Faculty and university administrators skilled in navigating complicated issues on campaigns had their authority usurped by Youngkin, his political cronies, and Trump appointees in Washington. That’s not how a university or any other institution should be run.

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. 

I’m emphasizing roles that are formally presidential appointments but usually not tied to the election cycle or considered political and partisan assignments like Cabinet secretaries. Christopher Wray was scheduled to run the FBI till 2027, but resigned from his 10-year term early because Trump planned to replace him with Patel. Rutter had served under presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden. 

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. 

Anyone picked by Trump for one of these jobs must be considered suspect. Some, like Patel, are clearly unqualified. A Trump appointee to run the Fed, no matter how credentialed, will almost certainly have promised not to run that agency in an objective way as a condition of being chosen by Trump. 

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 and Virginia Democrats are providing a model. Her new appointees for Virginia college boards aren’t well-credentialed, hyperpartisan crazies. They even include some Republicans (although not the MAGA kind.). And it’s great to see that Spanberger seems to understand that being anti-MAGA is critical right now, even for a moderate Democrat like herself who generally prefers bipartisanship over fighting. In addition to the education changes, among Spanberger’s first moves were rescinding a Youngkin executive order requiring Virginia law enforcement agencies to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She has also supported a push by Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature for a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to gerrymander its U.S. House districts, to balance out against what Republicans are doing in Texas and other states. 

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.