BIDEN’S CABINET CHOICES UPSET SOME
Civil rights leaders, liberals grumble too many are retreads
W I L M I N G T O N, D e l .
President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to fill his White House and Cabinet with long time colleagues has led to frustration from liberals, civil rights leaders and younger activists, who worry he’s relegating racial minorities to lower-status jobs while leaning on Obama-era appointees for key positions.
Biden’s Cabinet process has also discomforted some allies on the Hill, who say senators from his own party have not been sufficiently consulted about picks, even though Biden will need inf luential Senate Democrats to help steer nominees through the confirmation gauntlet. Senior Democratic senators have gotten little or no advance warning about the president-elect’s selections, according to a half-dozen senior congressional off icials and others familiar with the process.
Taken together, these concerns bring into focus the challenges Biden confronts as he tries to unite the party around his ambitious agenda and immediately staff his administration. Dissatisfaction from the party’s grass roots, and lawmakers not read into the presidentelect’s decisions, could hobble Biden’s ability to quickly move his nominees into position so he can execute on pressing priorities like the coronavirus pandemic response.
On the campaign trail, Biden promised to appoint a Cabinet that elevated upand-coming leaders in the party and ref lected the diversity of America.
Of the 14 Cabinet-level picks announced so far, seven are women and nine are people of color. But Biden has also mostly selected people he’s known for years, or even decades. The average age of Biden’s department heads so far is 63 years old, according to a Washington Post analysis. About 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word “Obama” on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs, the analysis found.
Some of them will be in similar roles as they held in the last administration.
Tom Vilsack — secretary of agriculture for all eight years of President Barack Obama’s term — will take up that role again under Biden, if confirmed. Vivek Murthy, who was Obama’s surgeon general, will have the same job for Biden. The incoming White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, worked for Biden in the same capacity when he was vice president.
“We cannot move forward in a new direction with just the same people, including some of the people who are responsible for the mess we are in,” said Evan Weber, the political director of the Sunrise Movement, a liberal group focused on climate issues. “We would like to see more young progressives in roles in the Biden administration.”
Weber and other liberals say they do not believe that Obama, who came into office with his party in control of both chambers of Congress, took bold enough steps on issues from climate to banking rules.
While Biden’s team is racially diverse, some observers note that Biden is leaning on older Black and Latino leaders, who may not understand the needs and priorities of a younger generation.
“There’s more appointments of color, but there is a lot of same old, same old,” said Sayu Bhojwani, a proimmigration activist and president of New American Leaders, a group that pushes for more diversity among elected leaders. “Having voices of color who have kind of grown up in a system that wasn’t built for people of color means that we’re not going to get innovation and we’re going to get people who are risk averse because they know the system.”
Biden’s bias toward government veterans stems from his view that the Trump administration steered the country significantly off track, that deep expertise will be necessary to restore it and a sense that there’s not time for a learning curve, according to transition aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberation.
The focus on Obama-era appointees could have advantages, some argue, creating in Biden’s team an automatic cohesiveness. “This is the mother-of-all-alumni group,” said Reed Hundt, who worked on the Obama transition and is author of the book “A Crisis Wasted,” about decisions made during that time to respond to the Great Recession.
In contrast, he noted, many members of Obama’s economic team didn’t know each other or the then-president particularly well when they started. That left key players learning to work with each other and determining how to best work with the president as they were also trying to solve a economic crisis.