Call it the insider administration.
The incoming Biden administration is shaping up to be a team of insiders filled with Washington household names.
Biden has picked Obama-era officials, members of Congress, and people from his inner circle for his White House, a move that indicates he is aiming for stability and expertise as he inherits a recession and public health crisis.
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This tactic to staff up the White House is the opposite of the drain-the-swamp movement from four years ago, which led to lobbyists scrambling to get to know the incoming Trump administration officials.
“We’re in a transition from an unorthodox administration to an orthodox administration in such a time of chaos with the pandemic and with the transition being somewhat challenged,” said Ivan Zapien, a longtime Democratic lobbyist.
A theory about his strangest nominees and appointments
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If the staggered unveiling of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet has done little to enthuse the (broadly defined) left, it has also not yet been quite as disastrous as some predicted (and that will remain true so long as Rahm Emanuel remains outside the administration). What it has been, so far, is very puzzling.
Take what happened to Marcia Fudge. The Ohio representative was openly lobbying to be made secretary of agriculture, in order to focus the department’s attention on hunger and food security. She believed she had the relevant experience for the job and had even gone to the press with plans for what she wanted to do if selected: Her goal, as she explained in an interview last month, was to change the perception that the department only exists to help rural whites.
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The New York progressive told reporters at the Capitol that Biden’s incoming Cabinet needs “a more cohesive vision.”
“You have an individual appointment here, an individual appointment there,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We can wrestle about whether they are bold enough or ambitious enough, especially given the uncertainty and what kind of Senate we’re going to have.”
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“But aside from that, I think one of the things I’m looking for, when I see all of these picks put together is: What is the agenda? What is this overall vision going to be? And to me, I think that’s a little hazy,” she added.
“The roles they will take on are where the rubber meets the road where competent and crisis-tested governance can make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, enhancing the dignity, equity, security, and prosperity of the day-to-day lives of Americans,” Biden said in the statement.
Rice also previously served as national security adviser during the Obama administration, and will now direct the Domestic Policy Council, a unit with broad purview over Biden s domestic agenda, including health, immigration and education policy. The role does not require Senate confirmation.
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McDonough, who served as deputy national security adviser and later White House chief of staff under former President Obama, will need to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate in order to lead the sprawling Department of Veterans Affairs, an agency that has for years attracted public scrutiny as a result of management issues.