Seeking diverse Cabinet, Biden finds one group’s gain is another’s loss

WASHINGTON — The head of the NAACP had a blunt warning for President-elect Joe Biden when Biden met with civil rights leaders in Wilmington, Del., last week.

Nominating Tom Vilsack, a former secretary of agriculture in the Obama administration, to run the department again would enrage Black farmers and threaten Democratic hopes of winning two Senate runoffs in Georgia, Derrick Johnson told Biden.

“Former Secretary Vilsack could have disastrous impact on voters in Georgia,” Johnson cautioned, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by the Intercept. Johnson said Vilsack’s abrupt firing of a popular Black department official in 2010 was still too raw for many Black farmers despite Vilsack’s subsequent apology and offer to rehire her.

Biden promptly ignored the warning. Within hours, his decision to nominate Vilsack to lead the Agriculture Department had leaked, angering the very activists he had just met with.

The episode was only one piece of a concerted campaign by activists to demand the president-elect make good on his promise that his administration will “look like America.” In their meeting, Johnson and the group also urged Biden to nominate a Black attorney general and to name a White House civil rights czar.

The pressure on the Democratic president-elect is intense, even as his efforts to ensure ethnic and gender diversity already go far beyond those of President Donald Trump, who did not make diversity a priority and often chose his top officials because they looked the part. And it is coming from all sides.

When Biden nominated the first Black man to run the Pentagon this week, women cried foul. LGBTQ advocates are disappointed that Biden has not yet named a prominent member of their community to his Cabinet. Latino and Asian groups are angling for some of the same jobs.

Allies of the president-elect note that he has already made history. In addition to nominating retired Gen. Lloyd Austin to be the first Black secretary of defense, he has chosen a Cuban immigrant to run the Department of Homeland Security, the first female treasury secretary, a Black woman at the Housing and Urban Development Department, and the son of

Mexican immigrants to serve as the secretary of health and human services.

And, perhaps most notably, he picked Kamala Harris to be his running mate, making her the first Black person and the first woman to be vice president.

But the rollout of Biden’s Cabinet and White House picks has created angst among many elements of the party. While some say he appears hamstrung by interest groups, others point out that his earliest choices included four white men who are close confidants to serve as chief of staff, secretary of state, national security adviser and his top political adviser, leaving the impression that for the administration’s most critical jobs, Biden planned to rely on the same cadre of aides he has had for years.

“Added consternation,” the leader of one advocacy group in Washington said of Biden’s initial picks.

Glynda Carr, president of Higher Heights for America, a political action committee dedicated to electing progressive Black women, said there was a feeling of defeat that Biden had not awarded key jobs in his Cabinet to Black women, as the group had hoped.

Susan Rice, a Black woman who was United Nations ambassador and national security adviser in the Obama administration, had been seen as a candidate for secretary of state. Instead, she will become the director of Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, a position that does not require Senate confirmation. Rep. Marcia L. Fudge, D-Ohio, another Black woman, was passed over for secretary of agriculture, the job she and her allies had pushed for, and instead was nominated to be secretary of housing and urban development.

Both the state and agriculture jobs went to white men instead.

“For me, I certainly would want Susan Rice to be on the team rather than not be on the team,” Carr said, but that it was “disappointing” to see Rice in a position that was not Cabinet-level. “We need to continue pushing,” she added.

Picking Austin also did not assuage civil rights leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is adamant about the need for a Black attorney general, or at least someone with a background on voting rights enforcement.

Other activists are equally determined to prevent the president-elect from nominating people they view as too conservative and too timid in confronting racial injustices or too connected to the corporate world.