Neera Tanden, Joe Biden's pick to head the Office of Management and Budget — the first woman of color to oversee the agency — has been harshly criticized for her leadership, Business Insider reported.
The choice of Tanden, the president and CEO of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, came under immediate fire from Intercept reporter Ali Gharib, a writer for a CAP Action Fund project called ThinkProgress, where Tanden was his boss.
In a Twitter thread, Gharib called Tanden a "very bad organizational leader" who censored his work, adding that she lacked "leadership and moral courage."
But it's not the first time she's been the focus of her employees' concerns, BI noted.
In April 2018, BuzzFeed News published an investigation unveiling the CAP's apparent failure to address allegations of sexual harassment in the organization — and outing the anonymous victim, for which she later apologized.
And in 2008, when she was a top aide on Hilary Clinton's first presidential campaign, Tanden reportedly punched the chief editor of ThinkProgress in the chest after he asked a question to Clinton about the Iraq War, The New York Times reported.
"I didn't slug him, I pushed him," Tanden told the Times.
Republicans have also voiced doubts about Tanden's nomination and said she'd struggle to win over the Senate, BI reported.
After Axios reporter Alayna Treene tweeted her story that "some Democrats have discussed the idea of Biden choosing a 'sacrificial lamb' for Republicans to take down, thus easing the passage of other nominees," Josh Holmes, an adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., wrote about Tanden: "and there's the sacrifice to the confirmation gods."
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