Neera Tanden: Inside Biden’s failed attempt

Neera Tanden: Inside Biden’s failed attempt

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“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget. I’ll tell you what you value,” he said. “This is what you are going to do for us, Neera.”

The president-elect looked confident, as did Tanden when he spoke a few minutes later, that he would soon be installed in the administration and budget office, next to the west wing.

The slow collapse, which lasted for weeks, came to an end on Tuesday, when the White House announced that Tanden had withdrawn his appointment to avoid further distractions. In his own statement, Biden said he would still assign her a position in his administration, although a position that does not require confirmation from the Senate.

The person seen as one of the main candidates for the nomination in Tanden’s place – Shalanda Young, Biden’s choice to be deputy director of the OMB – went through a confirmation hearing on Tuesday, earning praise even from conservative Republicans.

A lesson for the Biden White House

The choice of Tanden, a close friend of the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, can offer an instructive and forward-looking lesson for the seasoned Biden government: despite decades of political experience in Washington, they are now operating under fragile Democratic majorities in Congress in a capital still very unstable by the Trump era.

Tanden’s downfall amounts to the first real stumbling block for the new team, which has yet to see most of the Biden Cabinet selections approved by large bipartisan majorities. All recent presidents have had one or more of their nominees disapproved. President Barack Obama took, for example, three attempts to find a secretary of commerce and two attempts to obtain confirmation from a secretary of health and human services. When he left office, President Donald Trump had already given up on making prominent appointments, preferring to appoint interim secretaries.

From the time of his appointment on December 1, Tanden has worked to calm skepticism about his choice – both Democrats and Republicans. For much of the past three months, she has met with 46 different senators, officials said, offering apologies and explanations for her salty, and often offensive, tweets that she fired during Trump’s term. The fact that the downfall of Tanden’s nomination was his Twitter account is an ironic turn of events, given the vitriol that often spewed from the former president on the same platform before being suspended earlier this year.

“I deeply regret and apologize for my language and part of my previous language,” said Tanden at his confirmation hearing last month, an acknowledgment that she still had a lot of work to do to win the hearts and minds of the senators who would determine her destiny.

In the end, it was not enough. Furthermore, a government official told CNN, the political capital spent trying to save its confirmation is necessary to try to stick the needle between Democrats to pass the Senate Covid-19 relief bill.

The episode highlights the government restrictions that Biden faces, despite enjoying Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. And it illustrates what some Biden allies describe as overconfidence by the president and his chief of staff – who was instrumental in pushing for Tanden’s choice – in managing a delicate political reality on Capitol Hill.

Tanden’s nomination was effectively rejected by a single center Democrat: Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whose statement of opposition last month on a Friday afternoon left the White House in turmoil and provided early warning of how a single vote can frustrate Biden’s legislative agenda. Manchin cited Tanden’s “openly partisan statements”, which he said would create toxicity between the White House and the Capitol.

Spending political capital

Manchin’s skepticism opened the door to more, but the White House insisted that it was not over for Tanden yet. And at Klain’s insistence, the government continued to press for it to be confirmed, even as it became increasingly clear that it would not get enough support.

Officials sought to highlight the support of moderate Republicans outside Congress, including former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. And they repeatedly pointed to her historic credentials – she would have been the first woman of South Asian descent to head the OMB – as evidence of her merit for confirmation.

An official said the White House wanted to demonstrate that he would fight for his nominees, although many inside the building acknowledged that Tanden’s nomination was probably doomed. The official said he would have looked weak if Biden had given in, especially since the main criticisms of Tanden – that his tweets were cruel – could be seen as sexist.

“Let me be clear: let’s confirm Neera Tanden. That’s what we’re working on,” said Klain during an appearance on MSNBC last week.

He was not alone in his desire to continue pushing; Biden himself was on board, as were other senior advisers, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Let’s push,” said Biden last month, even when it became clear that the door to confirmation was closing. “We still think there is a shot, a good shot.”

Still, within the government, Klain was seen as Tanden’s strongest defender and the most ardent voice in pressing to continue his nomination.

“Ron is not a dispassionate observer here,” said a senior Democrat who worked with Klain on CNN last week before Tanden’s withdrawal, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid alienating the White House. “He selected Neera and he doesn’t want that to fail.”

However, the worrying signs continued. Several aides told CNN that Biden’s team was so confidently leaning towards the idea that his party would fall in line with the nominations that a minimum outreach was conducted to convince moderate Republicans to vote for Tanden.

On Wednesday of last week, the two committees that were scheduled to vote on Tanden’s nomination abruptly delayed them. But it was not the Republicans who caused the impediment; Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from central Arizona, declined to say how she would vote, and the committee did not want to risk going ahead without knowing the outcome.

The nomination finally appeared dead after Senator Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Alaskan Republican, signaled to the White House that – despite an individual meeting where issues related to her state were discussed in detail – she would not support Tanden’s nomination.

Speaking moments after the announcement of Tanden’s withdrawal, Murkowski did not seem surprised.

“It was kind of going in that direction,” she said, going on to describe how she had shown maps of Alaska’s tribal lands to Tanden during the long-awaited meeting.

In trouble from the start

It wasn’t like Biden, Tanden or Klain imagined things three months ago.

When Tanden was selected, Biden’s transition team believed that Republicans would control the Senate, which made his nomination even more confusing. But at the time, Biden and his aides relied heavily on their training, including how she was raised by a single mother who came from India to the United States.

“I’m here today because of social programs,” said Tanden on the day of his appointment, standing on the stage near Biden in Wilmington. “Because of budget choices. Because of a government that saw my mother’s dignity and gave her a chance.”

However, one of the biggest obstacles to confirmation came after Georgia’s runoff run effectively handed over Senate control to Democrats, which suddenly made Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, the leader of the Budget Committee.

Tanden and Sanders had been publicly confused for years, since the 2016 presidential campaign, when she served as an adviser to Hillary Clinton. Sanders blamed Tanden, among other establishment Democrats, for his defeat in the primaries.

Until the final moments on Tuesday, Sanders did not embrace her as Biden’s nominee to lead the OMB.

“Neera Tanden doesn’t have the votes, so we’ll have to see what happens in the future,” Sanders told Wolf Blitzer of CNN just before the White House withdrew his nomination.

When pressed for his position, Sanders replied, “I will make that decision when the vote takes place.”

CNN’s Manu Raju, Phil Mattingly and Lauren Fox contributed to this report.

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