President Biden is slowly assembling his Cabinet, but what’s likely to be his most fiery Senate confirmation showdown (featuring his old friend and rival Bernie Sanders) hasn’t even been scheduled yet.
Biden’s announcement that he had tapped Neera Tanden, 50, as the director-designate of the Office of Management and Budget, tasked with drafting his budget and overseeing his administration’s budget plans and policy implementation, was met with derision from his left and right.
But even before Tanden’s candidacy is put to a vote on the floor of the Senate, she is facing some friendly fire: Democratic opposition.
Sanders’s Senate Budget Committee has jurisdiction over Tanden’s position, and the pair have openly clashed. Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, as well as an alumna of former President Bill Clinton’s administration, was a fierce backer of Hillary Clinton’s two White House campaigns, using CAP to boost her bid.
The newly installed chairman has yet to schedule Tanden’s confirmation hearing. While his panel is tied up with Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 rescue package and efforts to legislate a federal minimum wage hike, his decision to delay her appearance has dredged up the pair’s past public clashes when Sanders challenged Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
“I don’t know, honestly. We’re working on it,” he told reporters last week when asked about the timeline. “It’s going on. … Obviously, there’s a process we’re going to go through.”
In 2016, Sanders blasted Tanden in a letter for “maligning my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas.”
“I worry that the corporate money CAP is receiving is inordinately and inappropriately influencing the role it is playing in the progressive movement,” Sanders wrote.
And the animosity hasn’t abated. Sanders’s 2020 campaign spokeswoman tweeted last November that Tanden embodied “everything toxic about the corporate Democratic Party.”
CAP has been scrutinized over its donors’ contributions, including millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates in the past decade. Her leadership of the group has also been criticized, particularly her handling of an alleged sexual harassment victim.
Tanden has received support from liberals such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and California Rep. Barbara Lee, but a congressional quirk could help push Sanders on Tanden’s nomination. The Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee shares jurisdiction over her role. If its chairman, Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, were to report out her nomination, Sanders’s committee panel would have just 30 days to act before it’s canceled.
During her rollout event, Biden stressed her immigrant upbringing as the child of a single mother who relied on food stamps, while also calling her “a brilliant policy mind with critical, practical experience across government.”
Republicans have latched on to Tanden’s pugnacious Twitter presence. Tanden, from her CAP perch, lashed out at former President Donald Trump and his congressional allies on social media and during TV appearances. And Republicans were quick to contend Tanden’s social media tenor wasn’t in tune with Biden’s call for unity.
“I just think she’s going to be radioactive,” Texas Sen. John Cornyn said last month.
She even deleted more than 1,000 of her roughly 88,000 tweets, apparently worried that the posts might sink or complicate her nomination. In her missives, she has attacked the likes of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a centrist Republican whose support she may need in a Senate that is evenly divided between the two parties. She’s also gone after most of the Republican senators who were up for reelection in 2020. (Vice President Kamala Harris, though, can cast a tiebreaking vote, if required.)
Her online screeds against her political rivals came while Democrats were criticizing Trump for doing the same to foes and friends alike.
Online, she has also elevated the conspiracy theory that Russia hacked voter systems in 2016 and altered the results to favor Trump. She voiced her frustration, too, with school closures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, drawing incorrect parallels with France’s approach.
Tanden also has broken with former first lady Michelle Obama, who once said that when Trump and Republicans “go low,” Democrats should “go high.” The OMB nominee is not a fan of the high road as a political tactic.
“One important lesson is that when they go low, going high doesn’t f—ing work,” Tanden wrote, according to the Wayback Machine, an internet archive.
A spokesman for South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Senate Budget Committee’s ranking member, remained mum on the Republican approach to Tanden’s hearing.
But a Republican operative told the Washington Examiner that the GOP has more substantive issues with Tanden’s nomination, describing the Twitter complaints as a Democratic distraction. The source suggested there would be questions on Tanden’s stance on a federal $15 minimum wage after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen faced a similar line of inquiry. Tanden has been against a minimum wage raise in the past, saying in 2015 that it would be “counterproductive.” She’s also advocated for the “Green New Deal,” but she has pointed out the unpopularity of “Medicare for all.”
