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Progressives allied with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are furious at President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to choose Neera Tanden, a Hillary Clinton loyalist, to lead the White House budget office.
Tanden, chief executive of the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress and longtime assistant to the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, has previously openly criticized Sanders and clashed online with progressives on policy differences.
If confirmed, Tanden would be the first woman of color to head the Office of Management and Budget, the agency responsible for developing and implementing the federal government’s spending plan. But she faces a narrow path to confirmation: Biden’s announcement on Monday that he planned to appoint Tanden, 50, drew a backlash from Republicans, as well as some progressives.
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The fate of Tanden, along with many other candidates for Biden’s cabinet, depends on two Senate ballots in Georgia on Jan. 5 that will determine whether Republicans retain their majority in the Upper House. If Democrats won both races, they would get a 50-50 split in the upper house, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris then voting for the tiebreaker.
“Everything toxic in the corporate Democratic Party is embodied in Neera Tanden,” tweeted Briahna Joy Gray, Sanders’ former national press secretary, sharing a video of Tanden speaking out against Medicare-for-all.
Sanders has not publicly responded to Biden’s decision.
The two have a historically thorny relationship: In the 2019 presidential primary, Sanders wrote a fiery letter to the Center for American Progress, which Tanden led, accusing it of “slandering my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas.” .
“I am concerned that the corporate money the CAP receives is excessively and inappropriately influencing the role it plays in the progressive movement,” Sanders wrote.
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The Vermont senator, a self-proclaimed Democratic socialist, also slammed a video by ThinkProgress, a Center for American Progress Action Fund project, which accused him of changing his rhetoric about wealthy Americans after he became a millionaire into 2016.
Bad blood runs deep. In 2019, the New York Times reported that Tanden, years earlier, had punched Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager, “in the chest.” The incident allegedly occurred in 2008 after Shakir, then editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress, asked Clinton about the Iraq war, an issue that had plagued her presidential campaign.
Tanden told The Times she “didn’t hit him, I pushed him.”
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“It’s like putting Chelsea Clinton in the office,” Kurt Ehrenberg, a longtime former political strategist for Sanders in New Hampshire, told Politico. “She is clearly not a friend of the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.”
Yet other progressive Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Representative Barbara Lee, D-California, and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, have praised Biden for having chose Tanden and defended its record.
“A great choice to lead the OMB,” Lee tweeted Monday. “@NeeraTanden will bring the urgently needed experience and humanity to this post. Congratulations!”
“I agree,” Warren wrote, linking to a tweet from Sen. Sherrod Brown, in D-Ohio, calling Tanden “smart, experienced and qualified” to become director of OMB.
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