Global InformationNannygate information
"Nannygate" is a popular term for the 1993 revelations that caused two of President Bill Clinton's choices for United States Attorney General to become derailed.
In January 1993, Clinton's nomination of corporate lawyer Zoë Baird for the position came under attack after it became known that she and her husband had broken federal law by employing two people who had immigrated illegally from Peru as a nanny and chauffeur for their young child. They had also failed to pay Social Security taxes for the workers, the so-called "Nanny Tax", until shortly before the disclosures. While the Clinton administration thought the matter was relatively unimportant, the news elicited a firestorm of public opinion, most of it against Baird. Within eight days, her nomination lost political support in the U.S. Congress and was withdrawn.
The following month, Clinton's choice of federal judge Kimba Wood for the job was leaked to the press, but within a day it became known that she too had employed someone who had immigrated illegally to look after her child. Although Wood had done so at a time when such a hiring was legal, and had paid Social Security taxes for the worker, the disclosures were enough to cause the immediate withdrawal of Wood from consideration. The Clinton administration then said that the hiring practices for household help would be examined for all of the more than thousand presidential appointments under consideration, causing the whole process to slow down significantly. Determined to choose a woman for the Attorney General post, Clinton finally selected state prosecutor Janet Reno, who was confirmed and served through all eight years of the administration.
The Nannygate matter caused wealthy Americans to ask each other if they too had a "Zoë Baird problem", as the hiring of illegal aliens and the paying of household help off the books were both commonplace. Two fault lines, gender and class, were exposed in the discussion over Nannygate: in the former, a double standard was seen wherein female appointees faced a greater risk of being questioned and disqualified based upon their childcare arrangements, while in the latter, affluent professional women who could afford live-in childcare arrangements were seen as trying to get away with an illegal act. Nannygate-type controversies have subsequently affected other political appointees both in the U.S. and in other countries.