After Losing Bid for Budget Chief, a New Role for Tanden

Biden's former pick to lead OMB will instead serve as a senior adviser to the president
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted May 15, 2021 7:30 AM CDT
Neera Tanden Finds a Role on Biden's Team
In this Feb. 10, 2021, file photo, Neera Tanden, then President Biden's nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington.   (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool, File)

Neera Tanden may not have gotten the budget chief job she'd wanted, but she's now going to the White House. Officials there told NBC News on Friday that Tanden, whom Biden had originally tapped to lead the Office of Management and Budget, will instead serve as the president's senior adviser, directed to oversee a review of the US Digital Service, which is responsible for tending to the federal government's IT and security issues, as well as making government agencies accessible to the American people. Another major project Tanden will reportedly be tasked with: preparing a plan for possible policy changes as a result of future Supreme Court decisions on GOP efforts to strike down ObamaCare, aka the Affordable Care Act.

Tanden, whose new role doesn't need Senate confirmation, was forced in March to withdraw her name for consideration as Biden's OMB director after Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin joined several Republican senators in condemning previous incendiary tweets she'd posted going after political rivals. She deleted more than 1,000 of those tweets from her personal Twitter account after Joe Biden won the election, per CNN. "It was clear that she would not garner enough Republican support to be confirmed," the AP notes. Tanden, 50, was the first Biden nominee not to clear the confirmation process. Tanden, who served in the Obama administration and is a longtime confidant to Hillary Clinton, is also said to be a close ally of White House chief of staff Ron Klain. (More Neera Tanden stories.)

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