Biden unveils Cabinet, says ‘America is back’
WILMINGTON, Del. — Declaring “America is back,” President-elect Joe Biden introduced his national security team Tuesday, his first substantive offering of how he’ll shift from Trump-era “America First” policies by relying on experts from the Democratic establishment to be some of his most important advisers.
“Together, these public servants will restore America globally, its global leadership and its moral leadership,” Biden said from a theater in his longtime home of Wilmington, Del. “It’s a team that reflects the fact that America is back, ready to lead the world, not retreat from it.”
The nominees are all Washington veterans with ties to former President Barack Obama’s administration. There are risks to the approach as Republicans plan attacks and progressives fret that Biden is tapping some officials who were too cautious and incremental the last time they held power.
Biden’s picks included several women and people of color, some of whom would break barriers if confirmed to their new positions.
They stood behind Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris spaced apart and wearing masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
The president-elect’s team
includes Antony Blinken, a veteran foreign policy hand well-regarded on Capitol Hill whose ties to Biden go back some 20 years, for secretary of state; lawyer Alejandro Mayorkas to be homeland security secretary; veteran diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Obama White House alumnus Jake Sullivan as national security adviser.
As secretary of state, Blinken will lead Biden administration efforts to rejoin international agreements like the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, and is expected to oversee a tougher posture toward China.
Avril Haines, a former deputy director of the CIA, was picked to serve as director of national intelligence, the first woman to hold that post, and former Secretary of State John
Kerry will be a special envoy on climate change. Kerry and Sullivan’s position will not require Senate confirmation.
With the Senate’s balance of power hinging on two runoff races in Georgia that will be decided in January, some Senate Republicans have already expressed antipathy to Biden’s picks as little more than Obama world retreads.
Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, argued that Biden is surrounding himself with people who will go soft on China.
Sen. Marco Rubio, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that will consider Blinken’s nomination, broadly wrote off the early selections.
“Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline,” Rubio tweeted.
Biden said his choices “reflect the idea that we cannot meet these challenges with old thinking and unchanged habits.” He said he tasked them with reasserting global and moral leadership.
The president-elect said he was “struck” by how world leaders have repeatedly told him during congratulatory calls that they look forward to the U.S. “reasserting its historic role as a global leader” under his administration.
Trump appeared to defend his worldview Tuesday.
“We shouldn’t go away from that — America First,” he said at the annual turkey pardon, a lighthearted pre-Thanksgiving White House tradition.
Notably absent from the list is a nominee for defense secretary. Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy had been the favorite for the job but Biden has not yet finalized his choice. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is another contender for the job.
Biden’s spokesman, Jen Psaki, said Biden would name an economics team next week.
Biden said he expected advisers to tell me “what I need to know, not what I want to know.”
Haines said she accepted Biden’s nomination knowing that “you value the perspective of the intelligence community, and that you will do so even when what I have to say may be inconvenient or difficult.”
Haines said she has “never shied away from speaking truth to power” and added “that will be my charge as director of national intelligence.”
Biden celebrated the diversity of his picks, offering a particularly poignant tribute to Thomas-Greenfield. The eldest of eight children who grew up in segregated Louisiana, she was the first in her family to graduate from high school and college. The diplomat, in turn, said that with his selections, Biden is achieving much more than a changing of the guard. “My fellow career diplomats and public servants around the world, I want to say to you, ‘America is back, multilateralism is back, diplomacy is back,’” Thomas-Greenfield said.
Blinken spoke about his family’s journey to America, including his stepfather who escaped the Nazis as a child in Poland and greeted a U.S. soldier with the only words he knew in English, “God Bless America.”
Mayorkas, who is Cuban American, also offered a nod to his immigrant upbringing.
“My father and mother brought me to this country to escape communism,” he said. “They cherished our democracy, and were intensely proud to become United States citizens, as was I.”
But Mayorkas might pose the most difficult confirmation challenge from Biden’s early round of nominees.
The Senate previously confirmed him in December 2013 by a party-line vote to be the deputy secretary of Homeland Security. The Senate was controlled by Democrats then, and all of the chamber’s Republicans voted against his confirmation mainly because he was then under investigation by the Obama-appointed inspector general in that department. At the time, the Senate historian’s office said it was unprecedented for the Senate to vote on a nominee who was under investigation.
The inspector general, John Roth, found in March 2015 that Mayorkas, as director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, appeared to give special treatment to certain people as part of the visa program that gives residency preference to immigrants who agree to invest in the U.S. economy.
TRANSITION OF POWER
Meanwhile, there were signs Tuesday that the stalled formal transition of power is now underway. Biden’s team now is in contact with all federal agencies, according to a transition official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe developments that have not been announced.
At the Pentagon, Kash Patel, chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, is heading the department’s transition work. A transition task force has been assembled, led by Tom Muir, head of the Pentagon office that provides administrative and management services to all Defense Department facilities in the Washington area.
Muir said the first meeting with Biden’s team was held virtually Tuesday morning and that he expected daily meetings to come — some virtually and some in person. He said normal accommodations for the Biden team have been made, including provision of briefing materials, video-teleconferencing capabilities and office space inside the Pentagon.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar also said his agency is working to get briefing materials to Biden’s aides immediately and pledged a “professional, cooperative and collaborative” transition.
In recent days, senior Trump aides including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone had also encouraged Trump to allow the transition to begin, telling the president he didn’t need to concede but could no longer justify withholding support to the Biden transition.
Late Monday, Meadows sent a memo to White House staffers saying that their work was not yet finished and that the administration would “comply with all actions needed to ensure the smooth transfer of power,” according to a person who received it. At the same time, he warned staffers who are not specifically authorized to interact with the Biden team against contact with the incoming administration.
The moves came a day after the head of the General Services Administration wrote the necessary letter of “ascertainment” acknowledging Biden as the apparent winner of the election, triggering the transition process.
Trump, who continues to press a legal challenge to overturn the election results, again on Tuesday refused to concede his election loss.
Trump tweeted that “the [General Services Administration] does not determine who the next President of the United States will be.”