There’s at least one thing many left-wing activists and GOP senators agree on: not being fans of Neera Tanden.
On Sunday, President-elect Joe Biden announced a slew of picks for senior administration positions. Most of the names were expected, such as longtime Democratic operative Jen Psaki as press secretary or Kate Bedingfield for White House communications director. Neither position requires Senate confirmation.
But the news had many on the Left and Right saying, “It could be worse,” a common refrain after many Biden announcements.
Biden’s pick for the leader of the Office of Management and Budget, however, didn’t earn the same kind of charity. Tanden, the current president of the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank, has become a lightning rod over the years due to her vocal support for the conspiracy theory that President Trump was compromised by the Russian government and repeated criticism of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Already, both Republicans in the Senate and liberals are speaking out against the pick. A spokesman for Texas Sen. John Cornyn said her confirmation is in doubt, citing her sometimes belligerent criticisms of the Republican Party.
“Neera Tanden, who has an endless stream of disparaging comments about the Republican Senators’ whose votes she’ll need, stands zero chance of being confirmed,” Drew Brandewie wrote on Twitter Sunday evening.
Tanden has begun purging her Twitter feed and deleting any tweets about centrist Republicans who could stand in the way of her confirmation, like Maine Sen. Susan Collins. In the last several weeks, Tanden has deleted over 1,000 of her tweets, which included baseless implications that the Russian government modified 2016 vote totals to swing pivotal states like Wisconsin in the president’s favor.
“Why would hackers hack in unless they could change results?” she wrote in 2017. “What’s the point?” That same day, Tanden said reports of potential breaches into Wisconsin and Arizona voter databases are why “Trump was as surprised as everyone else” that he won the election.
Some of her speculation about the Russia investigation remains on her feed, including repeated claims that nothing in the discredited Steele dossier has been debunked. As recently as 2019, Tanden was asking, “What parts of the dossier have been disproven? I will wait.”
During his inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, special counsel Robert Mueller investigated a number of claims made by Christopher Steele, a British former intelligence agent hired by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to dig up potentially damaging information on Trump, and found them to be completely fallacious.
As much as her remarks about Trump will give fodder to GOP senators, Tanden’s potential nomination has agitated liberals who have long opposed her heavy involvement in Democratic politics. Knives from the Left have been out for her since her time at the CAP, which some argue drifted rightward during her tenure as president.
“IMO, it is not a coincidence that they are putting Neera Tanden — the single biggest, most aggressive Bernie Sanders critic in the United States of America — specifically at OMB while Sanders is Senate Budget Committee ranking/chair,” tweeted former Sanders speechwriter David Sirota on Sunday night.
Leaked emails from 2011 showed an exchange between Tanden and then-CAP employee Faiz Shakir debating the Obama administration’s intervention in the Libyan civil war, with Tanden cheering on U.S. involvement as potentially lucrative.
“We have a giant deficit. They have a lot of oil,” Tanden wrote. “Most Americans would choose not to engage in the world because of that deficit. If we want to continue to engage in the world, gestures like having oil rich countries partially pay us back doesn’t seem crazy to me. Do we prefer cuts to Head Start? … Because we live in deficit politics, and that’s what is happening and will be happening even more.”
Shakir went on to manage Sanders’s 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.
In 2018, Tanden was the subject of more unflattering press when a report described how, during an all-staff meeting, she disclosed the name of an employee who was allegedly the victim of sexual harassment. A subsequent statement from the CAP said the disclosure of the name was unintentional, although many employees believed at the time that it was retaliatory.
Although Sanders has yet to comment on how he would vote on Tanden’s nomination, other senior alumni of his now-defunct presidential campaign have called the pick a betrayal of Biden’s supposed liberal bona fides.
“Neera Tanden supports cuts to the social safety net, which, like a Republican, she refers to as ‘entitlements.’ Biden supported cuts to Social Security. And so does his team,” wrote 2020 Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray on Twitter, referencing comments Tanden made in 2010. “About half of Black seniors rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their retirement income.”
