Neera Tanden will start on Monday as a senior adviser to President Joe Biden in the White House two months after her cabinet nomination ran into trouble in the Senate.
Tanden, a veteran Democrat, will be tasked with preparing the administration’s response to any fallout from a challenge mounted by Republicans to the healthcare act in the Supreme Court, and the US Digital Service, which works to make the government more accessible online, according to news reports.
There has been no White House announcement of the appointment, but news reports said Tanden starts work on Monday.
President Biden had appointed Tanden earlier to head the Office of Management and Budget, a key department with broad oversight over the entire federal government. If confirmed, she would have become the first Indian-American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government (Republican Nikki Haley had held a cabinet-rank position as ambassador to UN).
Misgivings about her nomination began to be expressed immediately about tweets she had posted and since removed. She had targeted Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator who caucuses with Democrats, over his challenge to Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential nomination, and Republicans.
The final blow, however, came from a fellow Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin, whose vote in an evenly split Senate would be critical. He killed her chances by announcing his opposition to her nomination citing her “overtly partisan statements”.
The White House withdrew Tanden’s nomination shortly saying it was doing so at her request.
But President Biden made it clear he would find a place for her in his administration in some other capacity.
Ron Klain, a long-time associate of the president and his chief of staff, is understood to be Tanden’s strongest ally in the White House. He had lobbied hard to bolster support for Tanden’s nomination and was widely expected to ensure she landed a position in the Biden White House despite the Senate rebuff. She does not require Senate confirmation as senior adviser.
Tanden joins a battery of nearly 30 Indian Americans – or more – in the Biden administration that include Vivek Murthy, who is doing a second stint as surgeon general; Vinay Reddy, director of the president’s team of speechwriters; and Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the National Economic Council, a White House agency that advises the president on domestic and global economic policy.
Tanden had served as a senior adviser for health reform at the US Department of Health and Human Services entrusted with developing policies and provisions of the Affordable Care Act, then president Barack Obama’s signature law that is now called Obamacare. She went on to head a liberal thinktank centre for American Progress and was seen as a contender for a cabinet berth in a Hillary Clinton administration.
Tanden was born in Massachusetts in 1970 to parents from India, who had divorced when she was five. She and her brother were raised by their mother single-handedly and the family went through some bad times – Tanden has spoken of them relying on food coupons – government support – to get by.
