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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Neera Tanden, President-elect Joe Biden’s outspoken nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, faces the challenge of winning Senate confirmation after a race in Washington in which she has crossed powerful figures from both the right wing. as left.
Biden unveiled many of his top economic candidates on Monday, including Treasury Secretary candidate Janet Yellen.
Tanden, 50, executive director of the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress (CAP) and a long-time assistant to former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, would be the first woman of color to lead. the OMB. serving as the gatekeeper to the $ 4 trillion federal budget.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton called Tanden “a partisan stunt” on Twitter for once referring to Republican Senator Susan Collins as “the worst.” Tanden “is not eligible for confirmation by the United States Senate,” he wrote.
She has “zero chance” of being confirmed, warned Drew Brandewie, communications director for Republican Senator John Cornyn, due to her “endless stream of disparaging comments about the Republican senators whose votes she will need.”
Two rounds in Georgia on January 5 will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate. Long before Tanden was named, some Republicans threatened to block Biden’s cabinet elections.
CAP declined to comment on the criticisms of Tanden and referred questions to Biden’s transition team.
A representative of the transition team said the president-elect “looks forward to working in good faith with both parties in Congress to install qualified and experienced leaders,” adding that Biden “has been encouraged to see a number of Republican senators express their desire to to work”. together and indicate that they believe that presidents deserve freedom to form their team. “
Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, a close ally of Biden, called Tanden “smart, experienced and qualified for the position of Director of the WBO.”
John Podesta, chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton and founder of CAP, said the Tanden experience would benefit all Americans as the Biden administration worked “to heal the deep economic wounds created by the coronavirus pandemic, expand access to health care, fighting climate change and more. “
Tanden also won the endorsement of Richard Trumka, director of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, who tweeted that she would be a strong advocate for working families, “ensuring that our national budget addresses inequality. and remove the rigged rules of an economy has been against us for too long. ”
CRITICISM FROM THE LEFT
While Republicans criticized Tanden for his left-wing views, some Democrats view the think tank he leads as too pro-business, in part because Wall Street and corporate executives and grants provide some of their funding.
She previously argued with the progressive camp over her support for Clinton against Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential race, and was criticized for backing cuts to the Social Security retirement program to balance the budget nearly a decade ago.
When Sanders criticized the 2019 video from a CAP-backed news site about his personal wealth during the last Democratic presidential race, Tanden agreed that it was “too harsh.” Sanders’ office did not respond to a question about whether it would support Tanden’s nomination.
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said Tanden would not call herself a “progressive movement activist for life,” but neither did she threaten “an austerity scalpel” on the budget.
“Whatever her position on other issues, Neera Tanden has been actively outspoken in saying that now is not the time to worry about deficits,” Green said, “and that is an important signal for progressives.”
Some Republicans, including strategist Bill Kristol, urged conservatives to support Tanden’s nomination, suggesting that she would be more careful with federal funding than other Democrats.
“OMB is where the ill-considered projects of cabinet secretaries go to die, where programs are evaluated, where concessions are made. Neera Tanden is the right person for the job,” he wrote on Twitter.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Additional reporting by Heather Timmons in Washington and Trevor Hunnicutt in New York; Edited by Heather Timmons and Peter Cooney)
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