President-elect Joe Biden announced that he would nominate Neera Tanden as the next director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Tanden would be the first woman of color and the first South Asian American to lead the OMB.
The position: Prepares the administration’s budget proposal to Congress; reviews all regulations proposed by agencies.
** March 2, 2021 Update: Tanden, who would have been the first woman of color to lead the powerful budget agency, drew opposition because of past social media posts attacking Republican lawmakers. In a letter to the president withdrawing herself from consideration, Tanden acknowledged that she had no remaining path to confirmation and said she did not want to distract from other priorities. **
Neera Tanden was born in 1970 in Bedford, Massachusetts, to immigrant parents from India.She has a brother, Raj. Her parents divorced when she was five, after which Tanden’s mother was on welfare for nearly two years before obtaining a job as a travel agent.
Tanden received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1992 and graduated from Yale Law School with a Juris Doctor in 1996. At Yale Law School, she was submissions editor for the Yale Law & Policy Review.
As a freshman at the University of California, Los Angeles, Tanden met her future husband, artist Benjamin Edwards.
Tanden has worked on domestic policy on Capitol Hill, in think tanks, and for various Democratic senatorial and presidential campaigns. She currently serves on the New Jersey Restart and Recovery Commission and previously served as senior adviser for health reform at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services developing policies and provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
She is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, where she has served in different capacities since 2003, and has focused her career on pursuing policies designed to support working families, foster broad-based economic growth, and curb rampant inequality.