Biden picks Vilsack to lead USDA again, Fudge for housing

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden has selected Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, to serve as the secretary of housing and urban development, people familiar with the transition said on Tuesday, the second African American he has chosen for his Cabinet in two days.

Biden also chose Tom Vilsack, who served as the secretary of agriculture for eight years under former President Barack Obama, to lead that department again, according to two people familiar with the president-elect’s deliberations. Vilsack, 69, a former governor of Iowa, is the seventh member of his Cabinet Biden has now chosen.

If Fudge, 68, is confirmed by the Senate, she would join retired Gen. Lloyd Austin of the Army, who would be the first Black defense secretary, and Xavier Becerra, a son of Mexican immigrants and nominee for secretary of health and human services, as the embodiment of Biden’s campaign pledge to assemble an administration that will “look like America.”

But even as he rolls out his picks for the Cabinet and key White House jobs, Biden is under increasing pressure from a variety of interest groups, liberal activists and Democratic lawmakers who have different opinions on what it means to make good on that promise.

For Biden and his transition team, the selection of key jobs has become a constantly shifting puzzle as they search for candidates who are qualified, get along with the president-elect, and help create the ethnic and gender mosaic that would be a striking contrast with President Donald Trump’s administration.

Allies of Fudge, including Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C, one of Biden’s most prominent Black supporters during the 2020 campaign, had urged the president-elect to put Fudge at the Agriculture Department, where she had hoped to shift the agency’s focus away from farming and toward hunger, including in urban areas.

Instead, Biden settled on Vilsack, who is white and from an important rural farming state.

But the decision to instead put Fudge at HUD, which is viewed by some advocacy groups as a more traditional place for a Black secretary, has the potential to disappoint those pushing for her, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, of which she is a former chairwoman. The current housing secretary, Ben Carson, is Black.

Just hours after Biden made official his historic choice of Austin for defense secretary, a group of Black civil rights activists urged Biden to nominate a Black attorney general and to make civil rights a higher priority.

“He said if he won, he would do something about criminal justice, police reform and specifically mass incarceration,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader and talk show host, said in an interview on Tuesday before a meeting with Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “He flew to Houston to meet before I did the eulogy for George Floyd. He made specific commitments. I’m saying, promises made, let’s see if promises are kept.”

Biden has not said whom he will pick to lead the Justice Department, though he is considering Sen. Doug Jones, who lost his bid for reelection in Alabama; Sally Yates, a former deputy attorney general; and Judge Merrick Garland, whom Obama unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court.

But Jeh Johnson, who served as Obama’s secretary of homeland security and is Black, took himself out of consideration to be attorney general on Tuesday, according to people familiar with his discussions.