New Joe Biden Administration: Democrats Fight Bitterly for Government Positions

A few days ago, the future president of the United States, Joe Biden, introduced the men and women at a hotel in Delaware who are supposed to do foreign and security policy for him. Anthony Blinken was present, along with the designated foreign secretary, as well as Jake Sullivan, the new security adviser, and John Kerry, the special envoy for climate policy. Avril Haines and Linda Thomas-Greenfield were also on stage, whom Biden wants to appoint as director of the secret service and ambassador to the UN, respectively.

Since staff speculation is currently the most popular pastime in Washington, it was immediately apparent that there was no one person who had a voice in foreign and security policy: Michèle Flournoy. The 59-year-old was deemed ready for the post of defense minister.

Flournoy studied at Harvard and Oxford, is a recognized military and security expert, and has had an impressive career in government. No woman has risen higher in the civil hierarchy of the Pentagon than she, in the administration of Barack Obama she was undersecretary of defense. Hardly anyone doubted that Biden would trust Flournoy to the Pentagon.

But Flournoy wasn’t at the Delaware hotel, and it leaked from Biden’s circle that Biden probably wasn’t quite sure who he wanted to be Secretary of Defense after all. At the same time, James Clyburn, the highest-ranking black MP in Congress, spoke. Clyburn is a close confidant of Biden and, through his election recommendation in South Carolina, made a significant contribution to Biden winning the Democratic presidential nomination.

Fierce battle for the Pentagon

Clyburn, you could say, is good at Biden. And Clyburn made it known to Biden publicly and unequivocally that he wanted to see more African-Americans in the cabinet. Only one black woman, UN Designated Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield, is quite disappointing, so Clyburn.

Since then, a fierce battle for the Pentagon has been fought in Washington, with open letters, Internet campaigns, and guest articles in the relevant newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Flournoy’s allies, including many renowned security experts at US universities and think tanks, have mobilized. They want the first woman to head the Pentagon.

But Clyburn supporters are against it. They ask Biden to appoint the country’s first black defense secretary and have put two opposing candidates against Flournoy: former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and former General Lloyd Austin. A decision from Biden is expected next week at the earliest.

The episode shows how difficult it is for Biden to put together his cabinet. In choosing his team, the future president has to maneuver between various wings and factions of his party, all of which have their own ideas and in some cases very clear demands on who should get what position and who should not.

Qualifications, experience, and good personal chemistry with the future president are important criteria. However, criteria such as gender, ethnicity and ideological orientation are no less important. In practice, this means that Biden must think at least as carefully about whether he is handing over the Pentagon to a woman or an African American as he does about whether that person knows anything about weapons contracts or hybrid warfare.

Another gap that plays an important role in personnel selection is that between the moderate liberal and left wing of the Democrats, between the centrists and the progressives. So far, Biden, an outspoken centrist, has not given the left a really prominent government office.

Reward for support in the electoral campaign

The hope of progressives that the president would make left-liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren Secretary of the Treasury has faded. The prospect of Biden adding his former pre-election rival Bernie Sanders to the cabinet as Labor Minister is not very good either. That led to anger among progressives. They argue that despite reservations, they supported Biden in the election campaign and contributed to his victory. For this they want to be rewarded. Well-known young MP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emphasizes this over and over again;

Biden certainly accepts the demands of progressives. However, to his surprise, the reward he had earmarked for the party’s left wing met with little acceptance there. Biden appointed Neera Tanden as future director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the White House budget department. This is a powerful but not very glamorous office.

Tanden, whose parents immigrated to the United States from India, runs the Center for American Progress in Washington, a kind of political thinking, planning and advisory organization that is not entirely to the left, but relatively. Biden initially targeted a 60-year-old white man named Bruce Reed as director of the WBO, a centrist for whom a balanced budget is more important than new social spending and against whom the party’s left wing immediately attacked with a petition on the Internet. The naming of the immigrant daughter Tanden, born in 1970, was therefore a kind of peace offer.

In the end, the Senate decides

For Bernie Sanders fans in particular, the personality seemed more of a provocation. Tanden has repeatedly and harshly criticized the left-wing senator, who is not a member of the Democratic Party but has since tried twice to become a Democratic presidential candidate. That’s why Tanden is being violently shot from Sanders camp, but at this point this resistance appears to be primarily a Twitter phenomenon that Biden can ignore. In any case, the Democrats who mutinied so successfully against Reed have not so far started a revolt against Tanden.

In the end, however, all the hard work in a balanced cabinet could prove futile: the ministers, ambassadors and the director of the OMB must be confirmed by the Senate before taking office. Republicans are currently in power there. And they have their own ideas when it comes to offices and people.

Posted: Dec 3, 2020, 7:31 pm