REUTERS/Mike Segar
- President-elect Joe Biden has nominated Neera Tanden to be the head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
- Tanden, CEO of Center for American Progress (CAP), has been criticized in the past for her leadership style.
- A former colleague who worked for Tanden said on Twitter Monday she was a “very bad organizational leader.” He accused her of lacking “leadership and moral courage.”
- In 2018, colleagues of Tanden said she was “impossible to trust” after she named a victim of sexual harassment in a company meeting, BuzzFeed reported at the time.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team announced Monday it had nominated Neera Tanden to be head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Biden administration.
This would make Tanden, the president and CEO of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), the first woman of color to oversee the OMB.
In recent years, some employees at CAP have heavily criticized Tanden for her leadership style.
Ali Gharib, a journalist at The Intercept, was a writer for a CAP Action Fund project called ThinkProgress when Tanden was his boss, he wrote on Twitter Monday. He accused Tanden of being a “very bad organizational leader” who censored his work.
He said he did not think Tanden was “evil,” but that she lacked “leadership and moral courage.”
—Ali Gharib (@Ali_Gharib) November 29, 2020
This isn't the first time Tanden's colleagues have raised concerns about her.
In April 2018, BuzzFeed News published a bombshell investigation unveiling the CAP's apparent failure to address allegations of sexual harassment in the organization. A memo by the CAP's employee union said while CAP "eventually took appropriate course of action," management "failed to adequately address the situation."
In a meeting with CAP staff two days after these revelations, BuzzFeed reported that Tanden named the anonymous victim at the center of the sexual harassment allegations. The woman, identified as Mary by BuzzFeed, reported several unwanted sexual text messages from a male colleague to CAP, but the organization never contacted her back.
After a BuzzFeed reporter tweeted the story, Tanden emailed Mary to apologize, the publication later reported.
One CAP employee who was in the meeting told BuzzFeed News: "There is literally one thing you cannot do in this meeting and that is out the victim and Neera did it multiple times ... It also destroys whatever small level of confidence in the system remained."
They added: "As a manager I don't know how I can tell staff to trust the system when the head of the organization just outed the victim in front of the entire organization. It is impossible to trust her."
Another CAP employee who was present in the meeting told BuzzFeed: "Neera lost the organization today. There was so much angst in that room. She outed the victim, and the subtext of every question was a lack of confidence in her leadership and ability to create trust within the organization."
In a statement to BuzzFeed at the time, a CAP spokesperson said that Tanden "unintentionally said the complainant's first name in the meeting today, and immediately and profusely apologized for it."
"She feels awful that it happened and that the victim's negative experience was compounded; she also expressed that the victim's actions in coming forward were courageous. Neera's horror was very evident in the meeting," the spokesperson said.
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, per the New York Times.
"I didn't slug him, I pushed him," Tanden said in an interview following the incident, per the Times.
Meanwhile, Republicans have also been voicing their doubts about Tanden's nomination and said she would struggle to win over the Senate.
Josh Holmes, an adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, tweeted suggesting that Biden didn't expect her to be confirmed — she was merely a "sacrifice to the confirmation gods."
Business Insider has contacted Tanden, CAP, and the Biden transition team for comment. Gharib did not respond to a Business Insider request for further details.