President-elect Joe Biden drew fire on Monday by tapping Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden to head up the Office of Management and Budget. But much of the controversy missed the most important part of her appointment: how it signals Biden is preparing to govern by executive order.
Understandably, much of the early attention on the appointment of Tanden has swirled around the many controversies in which the former Clintonite and Obama administration official has been embroiled.
A caustic presence on Twitter, Tanden once reacted to a report that Los Angeles wildfires were burning down Rupert Murdoch’s house by tweeting, “There’s a God. And she’s unhappy.”
Tanden also spent years promoting the most unhinged of the anti-Trump conspiracy theories, including the idea that Russian hackers actually electronically changed vote totals in the 2016 election and that Russia blackmailed President Trump. She even insisted into 2018 that the discredited dossier had “mostly proven to be true.” Scrambling to cover her tracks, Tanden has now deleted more than 1,000 tweets.
If confirmed, which is very much in doubt as we await results from the Georgia runoff elections that will determine control of the Senate, Tanden would leave behind a Center for American Progress that has been having problems. In 2018, Buzzfeed reported that Tanden had not properly addressed a sexual harassment complaint within the organization, and days later, she outed the accuser in front of the whole organization.
On top of this, and despite her liberal background, Tanden is very much reviled by the far Left of the party, in no small part due to an ongoing feud with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party that harkens back to her time in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Substantively, though, there are two important observations that are relevant to her appointment to lead the OMB.
One is, at a time during which the debt is exceeding the size of the economy and set to shatter the record for debt achieved when the United States was fighting World War II, Tanden has long since abandoned any interest in tackling deficits. Like many liberals, she has concluded that there is no reason to sacrifice priorities at the altar of fiscal discipline.
“It’s time we reset economic policy in Washington to focus on growth instead of deficit reduction,” Tanden told the Huffington Post in 2013.
But it’s important to keep in mind that while a president can lay out priorities in a budget document, ultimately, all spending has to be negotiated with Congress. So the OMB’s tangible influence on taxes and spending is limited.
However, there is another lesser-known, but in this case, more significant role for the OMB director — and that is helping to oversee regulatory policymaking. And this is where the Tanden choice is most revealing.
While an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius during the Obama administration, Tanden was one of the key architects of Obamacare. Among many other things, the law left a significant amount of regulatory discretion to federal agencies and departments, including HHS.
As president of the CAP after the Republican takeover of the House, Tanden pushed Barack Obama to bypass Congress in implementing many parts of the liberal agenda, such as on labor issues, guns, and immigration.
In 2016, Tanden also argued for Clinton to prepare for a series of sweeping executive actions in anticipation of her win. “I think Democrats are definitely in a more feisty mood than they’ve been in the past, so they’re willing to take on more fights with the Republicans,” Tanden told Vox in 2015. “I don’t think they’re concerned that doing an executive action offends the other side.”
When Biden is sworn into office next month, he will face, at best, a 50-50 Senate with a narrower majority in the House of Representatives and could end up having to deal with Republican control of the upper chamber. That means he cannot expect to pass any sort of transformational agenda through the legislative process, and he will therefore look to ways to get things done through executive actions.
Already, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren have been pushing for Biden to forgive student loan debt with the stroke of a pen. This on top of expected regulatory changes on guns, immigration, the environment, and healthcare.
With the Tanden pick, Biden is indicating that he wanted a vicious Washington insider who is intimately familiar with the organs of government and who has spent years thinking long and hard about ways for a liberal president to get around the inconvenience of passing legislation through Congress.
