Today, Explained - The key to the Cabinet

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

President-elect Biden has started announcing his Cabinet nominees, but Matthew Yglesias says the most important positions aren’t the ones you’d think. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It's December, and there's still a president in the White House claiming he won an election he obviously lost. But that hasn't stopped President-elect Joe Biden from assembling a crack team of cabinet nominees. You gotta be nuts, too. Who do you got on mind? All right, who's in? Tony Blinken for Secretary of State. For my family, as for so many generations of Americans, America has literally been the last best hope on Earth.

My grandfather, Maurice Blinken, fled pogroms in Russia and made a new life in America. Janet Yellen for Secretary of the Treasury. After this is over and the economy is recovered, we'll have to deal with deficits and get them under control. But now is a time when I think it's not necessary to worry about it. Alejandro Mayorkas for Secretary of Homeland Security.

My father and mother brought me to this country to escape communism. They cherished our democracy and were intensely proud to become United States citizens, as was I. Then there are the nominees for White House staff. We've seen Neera Tanden pick to run Office of Independent Budget, Cecilia Rouse to run Council of Economic Advisors, and probably most important of all, Ron Klain to be White House chief of staff. Matthew Iglesias, co-host of The Weeds podcast, author of The Slow, Boring Newsletter. Before we get to Biden's cabinet picks, what do we know about Ron Klain, Biden's nominee for White House chief of staff? He worked in the Clinton White House. He was a staffer there. He came to be Al Gore's chief of staff. Then he was brought on by Biden when he became vice

president. So Klain did that. He left government. Then President Obama brought him back in to be the kind of Ebola czar during that crisis. And so it was very fortuitous to Biden that he had this very experienced advisor who specifically also had experience with pandemic fighting. The fact of the matter is the Trump administration has a history of failure in dealing with the COVID crisis, including a dramatic and drastic failure on the testing challenge. And so I think just, you know, if the Trump administration positions were just supposed to trust them that this is all going to work out, I think that's a hard sell to the American people. That became a sort of big part of Klain's brand while he was out of government. He talked a lot,

he wrote for Vox about pandemic preparedness. Klain's also somebody who is liked by both the more progressive and more moderate wings of the party. He's not clearly aligned with either, but he gets along with a lot of people. Everybody feels that he is fair-minded and listens to them, and they have confidence that they can get a sort of a strong hearing in a White House process that he runs. Okay, let's move to the cabinet. And I want to focus on three of the big ones that have been announced recently, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of Homeland Security. Let's start with Secretary of State. What do we know about Tony Blinken?

So Blinken is in line, if he's ultimately confirmed, to be, I think, one of the most influential Secretaries of State that we've seen, because there's often a split in the foreign policy domain between the prestige of the Secretary of State's office and the reality that the Secretary of State is often somebody like Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State as a gesture of respect on Barack Obama's part. She was not a close advisor of his, however. But Blinken was Biden's foreign policy advisor, national security advisor when he was vice president. He worked for him in the Senate.

He's worked on all of his presidential campaigns. So we're going to have a secretary of state who has the formal powers of office with a genuine relationship with the president of the United States. He also has a band in D.C. It's called Abe Lincoln. Able to see, but then I finally found somebody like me. Abe Blinken? Yeah, it's like it's a pun on his name. Nice. So, you know, he's an interesting character. And is Blinken kind of a conciliatory choice here?

I mean, I know that Susan Rice was a name being talked about, and she's obviously been the focus of lots of criticism from the Republicans. Is Blinken someone that's more confirmable? That's the intention here. I think if Democrats had done better in the Senate races, there would have been a lot of pressure to give the job to Susan Rice, who was national security advisor, was UN ambassador, is an African-American woman. She was really sort of next in line for it, and it would have helped Biden on his goal to assemble the most diverse cabinet. Republicans really don't like her. They're dug in on the idea that she did something wrong at Benghazi.

So the strong GOP position there would have preferred anyway, which is give the job to somebody he has a close personal relationship with, like Blinken. So the idea is for him to be a confirmable choice. But he has taken some criticism from Senate Republicans for some of his consulting work out of office. I mean, you look at what they put up with from the Trump family. I don't think you would say that's a real reason for Republicans to criticize him. But if they want an excuse to vote against him or block him, they could seize on that. How about the second of those three cabinet positions, Secretary of the Treasury? Remind me about Janet Yellen.

So Janet Yellen used to be chair of the Federal Reserve. Before that, she chaired the Council of Economic Advisors. She will be the first woman to serve as Treasury Secretary. She was the first woman to chair the Fed. She'll be the first person of any gender identity to have this kind of triple crown of economics. She has a reputation as probably being more progressive than she actually is. She has, I would say, sort of conventional centrist-y kind of opinions on fiscal policy, spend more now, perhaps spend less later. So there could be some tensions with the left there.

She's also seen by progressives, though, as more aggressive on financial regulation than a lot of other people who've been in the mix. She sort of threw the book at Wells Fargo as Fed chair for some of the shenanigans they got caught with. So there is a hope from the left that she will be tough on that, tough on the bank regulation. I think one of the areas where Biden is somewhat maybe privately critical of the Obama administration is that he thinks that it would have been better, if nothing else, as a matter of show, to like crack down on some bankers and like show that you could channel the people's anger at the Great Recession. Both Biden and Yellen, I think, would be more supportive of kind of harsh measures against financial industry actors that sort of go astray than the old Obama-Geithner team was.

Okay, let's hit the third big cabinet position, Secretary of Homeland Security. Who's Alejandro Mayorkas? So Alejandro Mayorkas, he was deputy secretary at the end of the Obama administration. Before that, he was in charge of legal immigration. He was a U.S. attorney before that. He is himself an immigrant from Cuba. There's a lot of thorny questions in immigration policy, not a lot of agreement between the parties. So, you know, he should be confirmable. He was confirmed twice before for immigration-related posts. And is Mayorkas someone that is acceptable to, say, the more moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party? He has not taken much criticism from immigration activists. So Obama, in his first term especially, he actually boosted deportations to

the highest levels on record as part of a sort of long-term political strategy that didn't work. He was the deporter-in-chief. Yeah, so there's a fair amount of anger among immigration advocates for the sort of architects of that policy. They don't seem to feel that Mayorkas is responsible for that, nor have Republicans particularly held him accountable, which is to say he's a low-key guy. If you remember the Obama years, you probably do not remember Ali Mayorkas being a big public face of the administration. So that's sort of what the doctor ordered. He's both experienced, but a little bit low key, and they hope they can sort of thread the needles there. And looking at these nominations as a whole, you know, what do they

tell you about how Biden's planning to run his administration? Biden is placing a lot of value on experience. A lot of new presidents are elected with the idea that they're outsiders who are going to drain the swamp or fix broken Washington politics. Joe Biden does not fit that bill very well. He is not an outsider at all. He's the absolute opposite of that. He was himself a senior White House staffer in the very recent past, because Trump was only there for one term. He literally knows all the people who served in the Obama administration, and he's picking people who he likes. An interesting thing about Biden is that he seems to be starting where a lot of presidents end up in their second term with like promoting people who used to be deputy secretaries up to be secretaries, that kind of thing. And that's because that is what

is important to Biden, I think, more than a particular ideological or factional worldview. He is trying to build a deeply experienced team that he thinks will do a better job of sort of moving the levers of government than Trump did. More with Matthew after the break. Thank you. digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate.

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with iGaming Ontario. Matthew, Biden's cabinet picks, they get a lot of attention. We're obviously covering them here on the show, but are they the most important people who are going to serve in the administration? No, I mean, the way the American government works in the modern era is that it is a very much White House-driven process. And the senior staff in the

White House matter more in terms of driving actual policy. The high profile of the cabinet has actually become a reason that the cabinet matters less, right? So presidents are making their cabinet selections with one eye on Senate confirmation, with one eye on maintaining their internal domestic coalition, with one eye on what kind of media stories are we going to write? Like, what are we going to say about the cabinet? And that means that the question of do I, President-elect Biden, actually want to listen to this person's advice is like maybe third or fourth on the list of considerations that are made. Whereas when you see somebody like Steve Ricchetti get a completely amorphous job as counselor to the president,

that means that Joe Biden really wants to hear what that guy has to say. His job has no specific responsibilities so that he doesn't get yelled at. But like, he's going to be there, right? Like right down the hall. And he could have just not done it. There's no need to appoint somebody to a job like that. It doesn't even pay that well. But the people who get those senior staff jobs wield a lot of influence, particularly if they are seen as being close personally to the president. So which are the positions that really matter a lot of influence, particularly if they are seen as being close personally to the

president. So which are the positions that really matter a lot here? Are we talking White House staff like chief of staff, or are we talking about sort of these informal advisory roles? You know, it all matters. But the chief of staff is by far the most important person in the government. The chief of staff is like the co-president, you know? He can call up anybody in the government anywhere and say, hey, what's up? And your understanding is that the president is speaking to you. There's no specific statutory authority, but it's a really big deal. So another White House position that people don't talk about that much but has a lot of power is the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, we call it. The Office of Management and Budget is one of the most important parts of the White House,

because they take every ask, every request for money, or to kill a program that any agency has, and they sort through it, and they decide what actually goes in the president's official budget request. And it's the OMB director, typically, who decides whose causes get fought for and whose gets sort of abandoned on the cutting room floor. OMB also contains an office called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and they sort of review every proposed regulation from throughout the government and decide whether or not it meets cost benefit scrutiny. So it's like a cliche to call that an obscure but powerful office, but it is obscure and it is super powerful. Is it almost like the more obscure the role,

the more powerful because it's just the reason they're being chosen is for their expertise, not for any of these other characteristics? Well, there's something to be said for that, right? The obscurity increases power because it means, yeah, you're really picking the guy you want. I would just also say that proximity to the president of the United States is a really big deal. Any big deal calls need to run through the Oval Office. And so your ability to be in those Oval Office conversations is really, really integral to your ability to influence policy. A cabinet secretary is more likely to be the public face of a policy, somebody who's on television to talk about the issue under your area, rather than someone who actually decides something

controversial. You know, thinking about this argument that cabinet positions are less powerful than these White House staff, I mean, I think about Elizabeth Warren, who wanted to be Treasury Secretary, or Bernie Sanders, who wanted to be Labor Secretary. I mean, if they actually wanted to influence policy more, would they want to be informal advisors to the president or head of OMB? So I think for Sanders, Sanders is a big believer in the power of sort of grassroots mobilization. And so in that sense, being a cabinet secretary, in theory, could let him, you know, barnstorm the country as labor secretary, standing with workers, organizing strikes, something like that. At least that's like his mental vision of it. In practice, though,

if you're the labor secretary and you're doing stuff that makes the president mad, you get a call from some flunky telling you to knock it off. So I never really thought that that made sense. You know, the Warren for treasury secretary thing, that was about progressives asking Biden to commit to a certain kind of left-wing economic policy. Putting Warren in there at Treasury would have been a symbol more than a practical kind of thing. I don't want to say that Treasury secretaries are unimportant, but their importance hinges on whether or not the president really has confidence in them. So we were talking before about Tony Blinken, who I think if he becomes Secretary of State, I think will be one of the most influential

Secretaries of State we've had in decades, because he really is a confidant of Joe Biden's, which is not going to be the case of the typical cabinet secretary. And under the Trump administration, you know, some of the most important people, some of the most influential people were people without these particular positions. Someone like Jared Kushner, who had this sort of vague senior advisor title and ended up leading the peace deals in the Middle East. I mean, is Biden going to be having this sort of close informal circle of advisors who wield all this influence? You know, Biden is going to have a more professional process. There is no son-in-laws in his senior team.

But, you know, I think the example of Stephen Miller, who probably if you listen to today explained, you know who he is. You're aware that he's an influential Trump figure. Now, if you try to stop for 15 seconds and say, like, what's his job, right? Nobody knows. He's just like some guy who's in the White House.

And he's very important because the president trusts him and he takes the lead role on immigration policy. And that matters a lot. People will emerge from the Biden White House who run certain portfolios and do certain kinds of things. There will probably be somebody picked specifically to be like a COVID czar, and that will be their title. But there's going to be lots of other issue areas where it's not quite as formalized as that. But we understand that this person is running this policy area. The White House is the central nerve hub of the government. And it's up to the president in a sort of freeform way to assign responsibilities to his senior staff there. And it's up to the president in a sort of freeform way to assign responsibilities

to his senior staff there. And anybody who has the title of assistant to the president, that's like the highest rank of White House staffer, they're going to be very important, and they can often be charged with things that are not exactly on any official org chart anywhere. And obviously, all of these nominees have to be confirmed. Currently, it doesn't look super likely that the Democrats will have a majority to confirm. Is the fact that all these nominees have tons of experience going to bode well for their chances? You know, I mean, this is just up to the Republicans, right? So if Democrats win these Georgia races, a 50-50 Senate does not mean it's easy to do

confirmations, right? Because one Democratic defection would block somebody. But these are all choices who would sail through a 50-50 Senate, because Chuck Schumer would control the floor, so they would all get votes. And then people like Susan Collins, people like Mitt Romney, who are, you know, inclined to be reasonable, they have no real reason to vote against any of them. No Democrats have any reason to vote against them. So they should just go through. Now, Mitch McConnell controls the floor. It's a different question. You remember with Merrick Garland, right? He didn't get a vote. Sure. Right? The majority leader has that power. So even if Susan Collins would say,

yeah, I have no problem with Janet Yellen, it matters whether the majority leader wants to even stage the votes at all. Now, none of these people are people who would anger Senate Republicans in a genuine way. But you don't need to be genuine. I mean, it's it's politics, right. And I think especially as we move beyond the national security roles, like it's not obvious to me that Republicans care whether the Labor Department like exists at all. So they might just not want to confirm, you know, whoever Biden picks there. So he started with state treasury, you know, roles where I think Republicans

would have some discomfort about not confirming somebody. But we're really going to have to see, like, congressional politics is its own logic. And I think it's wrong to assume that the personal characteristics of the nominees are going to be the decisive consideration here. Matthew Iglesias is a co-host of The Weeds Podcast and the author of the new Slow, Boring newsletter on Substack. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, sitting in for Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.