Biden’s Far-Left OMB Pick - Neera Tanden
It’s well known by now that Neera Tanden, President-elect Biden’s pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is a thoroughgoing ding-a-ling.
With McCarthyite unrestraint, she has dubbed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “Moscow Mitch,” judging him a treacherous Russophile. She has insisted Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-ME) “terrible treatment of Dr. [Christine Blasey] Ford should haunt Collins the rest of her days.” The “terrible treatment,” of course, was rejecting Ford’s implausible allegation of attempted rape by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Tanden also spurned Michelle Obama’s precept “when they go low, we go high,” rejoining that “going high doesn’t f**king work.” And Tanden seems to have misreckoned that she could expunge these and countless other comments by deleting them from her Twitter page. (The media took more interest in them after she did that.)
Her unseemly personality has politics to match. An upper-level executive of the fringe-left Center for American Progress (CAP) since its founding in 2003, and its president since 2011, Tanden has advocated enjoining “long stay-at-home orders” for COVID-19, returning the U.S. corporate tax rate to its 2017 level of 38.9 percent—the highest in the world—and “completely reinvent[ing] the global economy,” i.e. devastating energy hubs like Texas to counteract climate change.
Tanden’s foul tweets about McConnell, Collins, and numerous other senators have Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) office predicting the OMB nominee won’t get approved. But conservatives have reasons to consider confirming her.
GOP consultant Luke Thompson has made part of the right-wing case for Tanden in the London Spectator’s U.S. edition, arguing that her “toxicity could make her an unwitting bulwark against liberal achievements.” He cites her role in drafting Obamacare, whose poor design and unpopularity have already led to the repeal of its health-coverage mandate and prompted (modest) Trump-era regulatory changes giving consumers more insurance options. Tanden’s stewardship of CAP hasn’t spoken any better of her competence; she censored writers affiliated with the think tank when they contradicted positions taken by the Obama White House and she mistreated female CAP staffers who alleged sexual harassment by colleagues.
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If Tanden becomes OMB director, she will be charged with submitting budgetary projections to Congress and, more critically, vetting regulations crafted by federal departments. Appointing a nutter like her, Thompson explains, could bollix Biden’s executive agenda. Sweet.
And something else ironically suits Tanden to run OMB: she and CAP have occasionally blundered into admitting some of the very truths they are paid by George Soros, organized labor, and other powerful left-wing interests to deny. In 2012, Tanden acknowledged that, in order to “address long-term deficit reduction,” lawmakers must put Social Security and Medicare “on the table” for spending cuts. And in 2019, she tweeted, “Single payer Medicare for All does not have majority public support.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the editors of the Marxist Jacobin magazine have tried to argue these remarks show that CAP is a pseudo-progressive outfit standing in the way of real leftism, and that Tanden will behave similarly as head of OMB. That’s too good to be true: Both CAP and Tanden have since denounced the idea of entitlement cuts and championed Medicare for All.
But if Biden’s nominee gets Senate approval, conservatives and libertarians should never let the public forget her hypocrisy. Indeed, they should call attention to Biden’s own flip-flopping, for he once advocated freezing Social Security spending. Biden and Tanden’s past statements corroborate what every informed and honest American knows: entitlement outlays are growing unsustainably. Social Security and Medicare trustees’ reports project that these programs will collapse in 15 to 20 years. And that’s an optimistic forecast. Because the $3 trillion Social Security “trust fund” that policymakers keep talking about is an accounting contrivance, not an actual pool of money designated to pay Social Security benefits, the program’s fiscal dangers are really much more immediate.
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Social Security has already suffered shortfalls in its disability-benefit program and it covered those shortfalls with surplus money from its retirement program. Such gambits won’t work for much longer. R Street Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Bydlak explains the problem thus: “In the past, lawmakers have used the ‘surpluses’ within Social Security as a way to pay for other priorities, but will soon face a world in which that option no longer exists—and they must choose between across-the-board cuts or skyrocketing deficits.”
Does that sound alarming? Does it sound more so to hear that Bydlak wrote those words in 2019, a year before the explosion of coronavirus-related spending and revenue losses of 2020?
Neera Tanden’s ineptitude might frustrate Joe Biden’s regulatory plans. And her fleeting bouts of candor ought to reanimate Republicans when it comes to entitlement reform. Show the lady in.
