How Biden’s team botched his Cabinet debuts

President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to nominate a recently retired military general as Defense secretary blindsided the lawmakers who will have to pass a waiver to allow for his confirmation. His choice of a former White House chief of staff as secretary of Veterans Affairs rankled war veterans who expected one of their own to lead the agency. Neera Tanden, Biden’s pick for OMB director, hacked off allies of Bernie Sanders.

And the news that Biden would not be selecting the Latina governor of New Mexico to lead the Department of Health and Human Services — a step that came after she fell out of favor with the transition team for rejecting another position — prompted backlash from members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which criticized Biden’s allies for leaking the details.

The bumpiness of some of the rollouts of Biden’s Cabinet picks is a new phenomenon for a presidential campaign defined by its lack of leaks and drama.

Biden allies said he is putting together a Cabinet reminiscent of his campaign, a balancing act that aims to keep the peace and attempts to avoid antagonizing both the left and the right. The Biden team has also said it is on pace to have a historically diverse Cabinet — already, nine of the 14 people Biden has picked for Cabinet-level posts are people of color and seven are women. And in many cases, his choices — from chief of staff Ron Klain to incoming Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — have garnered accolades from a surprisingly ideologically diverse group of people.

But the series of personnel announcements have also hit turbulence. Some were rushed, some were delayed and some came as a surprise to those who expected to be consulted, critics say. Others say the transition team was caught off guard over how some of their picks would be received. Overall, it has been far from the quiet and carefully planned process many expected at the start.

“Way more chaotic than it needed to be,” one person familiar with the transition deliberations said of the rollouts overall. “And way too much drama.”

That could create more serious problems as the president-elect and his team gear up for a series of what are likely to be highly partisan confirmation battles, should Republicans retain control of the Senate next year.

The issues started with the earliest round of personnel announcements for White House senior staff and top Cabinet positions, a roster of mostly white faces named to some of the most powerful positions in the administration. And they continued as the team scrambled to contain the fallout from that lack of diversity.

There were no people of color among those announced as Biden’s chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, communications director, press secretary, or legislative affairs director. And the first two of the so-called “Big Four” Cabinet positions — Treasury, State, Justice and Defense — were both filled by white candidates. Lower-level positions within those rollouts, however, did include people of color.

Still, at the time it sparked alarm among Black, Asian American and Hispanic lawmakers and advocacy groups, whose wave of criticism threw the transition back on its heels.

“Announcing an all-white core leadership team put them at a tremendous deficit of trust,” the person familiar with deliberations said.

The backlash reached a fever pitch the week of Thanksgiving, when the transition team zeroed in on the secretary of Agriculture post and was on the verge of tapping former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.

The problem? Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge had openly been making her case for Agriculture secretary for much of November, arguing in an interview with POLITICO that it was time for a Black woman to head the agency.

“As this country becomes more and more diverse, we're going to have to stop looking at only certain agencies as those that people like me fit in,” she said then. “You know, it's always, ‘we want to put the Black person in Labor or HUD.”

On Nov. 25, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn stepped in. The most senior Black Democrat in Congress and a close Biden ally, Clyburn publicly criticized the Biden transition in a series of interviews for not yet being diverse enough. His spokesperson, however, disputed that there was any connection between the criticism and the secretary of Agriculture deliberations.

Clyburn's comments kicked off a wave of new pushback from lawmakers, who called for more representation among the highest levels of the nascent Biden administration. Amid the scramble to respond, other issues arose with some of Biden’s Cabinet picks.

After Clyburn spoke out, the USDA race appeared to break open, with new candidates jockeying for a post that was once seen as a lock for either Heitkamp or Fudge. And ultimately, Biden landed on former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, talking him into returning to the role he held for the entirety of the Obama administration.

The transition team viewed Vilsack, who campaigned extensively in Iowa with Biden, as a compromise pick. His past stint in the job, they believed, offered inarguable evidence of his qualifications, and they hoped it would neutralize insider disagreements over Fudge and Heitkamp.

“He wasn’t anxious to come back. He wasn’t looking for this job. But I was persistent,” Biden said Friday as he formally announced the latest suite of Cabinet picks. “I asked him to serve again in this role because he knows USDA inside and out.”

Those comments, however, further inflamed Black farmers and civil rights groups, who are seething over the decision to tap Vilsack, a white man. The former Iowa governor is not a candidate from an underrepresented group, and many farmers of color feel his record on civil rights should have disqualified him from the job. -

“When it came to issues of race, he was one of the worst I've ever come in contact with. What we don't want is Vilsack to come back,” said Lloyd Wright, a former director of civil rights at USDA, who sent a letter to Biden asking him to reconsider the nomination.

Some of that was tamped down last week when Shirley Sherrod, whose wrongful firing is a major source of the backlash against Vilsack, said in an interview that she had forgiven him and that he was qualified.

At the same time, Black Democrats were ratcheting up the pressure on Biden to tap an African American to lead the Defense Department. The job had long been assumed to be former senior Pentagon official Michèle Flournoy's for the taking, but the push from Congressional Black Caucus lawmakers and others led the president-elect and his team to nominate retired four-star retired Gen. Lloyd Austin for the post.

Those plans, however, left some congressional offices surprised. House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) had publicly backed Flournoy for the post just hours before news of the Austin pick broke. While Smith had been notified about Biden’s pick, the Biden team did not have a “fulsome discussion” with him about the actual waiver process, according to a senior House aide familiar with the conversations. Austin will need both chambers of Congress to pass a waiver before he can be confirmed to serve in the top Defense post.

Biden allies counter that choosing Flournoy would have brought another round of criticisms, including from progressives who had objected to her ties to defense contractors and role in WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm she co-founded with Biden's secretary of State pick, Antony Blinken. And Austin is also garnering his share of support.

“It's a great thing that General Austin has as much experience as he does," said Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.), a Marine veteran.

There were other personnel decisions, too, that drew complaints about a lack of advance notice, leading to lukewarm receptions.

Veterans service organizations had for weeks been lining up behind a handful of contenders to become secretary of Veterans Affairs, including former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and former Pennsylvania Rep. Patrick Murphy. Both men served overseas and either would have been the first post-9/11 veteran to lead the agency.

But last week, Biden turned to longtime Obama aide Denis McDonough as his choice for VA secretary. While McDonough has never served in the military, Biden and advisers believe the former White House chief of staff has the right mix of competence and compassion needed at the top, two people close to the transition process said. The agency, they said, needs a strong administrator like McDonough, adept at both cutting through red tape and restoring organizational stability.

But the pick prompted an outcry from veterans groups and other organizations that felt shut out of the process and were concerned not to see a veteran leading the department.

Transition officials began calling around to some groups only after POLITICO broke the news on Thursday morning, asking for their opinions and encouraging them to support McDonough’s nomination, according to three people with knowledge of the calls.

"The veteran community is stunned and they were not counseled,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “I don’t know any leading activist who got to weigh in on this pick. I’m getting calls now asking me to support it, but I didn’t get those before."

However, Jon Tester, Ranking Member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, told POLITICO that his conversations with McDonough were off to a good start.

"Denis called me immediately after his nomination looking to get to work on how we can deliver for our nation's veterans," Tester, a Montana Democrat, said in a statement to POLITICO. "I'm encouraged by the level of outreach we've received from him and other folks charged with ensuring the incoming Biden Administration hits the ground running."

Vetting in the age of Covid has brought its own set of difficulties. Many of the conversations for top posts have taken place over Zoom rather than in person. Still, the team is keeping pace in rolling out the nominations, argued former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

“It’s equally as smooth as Obama’s rollout of his Cabinet,” LaHood said. “I think when you look at the diversity, the experience, the know-how, I think Biden is hitting it on all cylinders right now.”

As for the complaints about not getting a heads-up, some actually see it as a positive: a sign of a buttoned-up operation.

“I think they’ve done a very good job of not leaking, which bodes well for the administration. ... To me, the fact that people didn’t get a heads-up is a good sign that this is an all-business, no-drama administration like Obama’s. We’re going to go back to a functioning government, this is a good thing,” said Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked as an Obama adviser.

“This is not a fight you can keep having or you’re going to burn political capital,” Giangreco added, saying at some point those complaining are going to want to talk about their issue more than the politics of it. “People in three months won’t remember this whole process. This fight has an expiration date on it, and the expiration date is Jan. 20.”

In reality, however, controversial nominees could lead to confirmation skirmishes that drag on for months, delaying policymaking at a critical time in Biden's first term. Even if Democrats were to win the two Senate runoffs in Georgia, they would still hold the slimmest of margins in the chamber; if Republicans maintain control, it will be even more difficult to push nominations through.

It's clear Biden's team is preparing for the challenges, particularly with Austin, who would need buy-in from both chambers to receive the necessary waiver.

A coordinated effort among Biden allies — both behind the scenes and publicly — has been underway to bolster the retired general. The messaging relies heavily on the fact that Austin would be the first African American in the position. Biden himself authored an argument for Austin in The Atlantic. And last week, CBC chair Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) and transition chair Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) urged colleagues in a statement to "support this historic nomination."

Biden's transition team defended the Cabinet picks.

"President-elect Biden is selecting nominees who have what it takes to overcome this moment of unprecedented crisis, deliver for American families, and bring the country together — which is why they have been embraced by leaders across the political spectrum and why they should be swiftly confirmed," said spokesperson Andrew Bates. "These are barrier-breaking, extraordinarily qualified nominees who represent the diversity of our nation, and he looks forward to continued close consultations with Senators on this process."