Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo
Then–Vice President Joe Biden and his chief of staff, Bruce Reed, at the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, October 2013
Virtually all of the Biden campaign’s senior staff has been named to White House jobs, save one. That would be Bruce Reed, the longtime head of the center-right Democratic Leadership Council, a former chief of staff to the vice president from 2011 to 2013, and a notable budget hawk.
Maybe Team Biden is having second thoughts about Reed? Let’s hope so.
In 2010, Reed served as executive director of the Bowles-Simpson Commission, one of Barack Obama’s worst blunders. The commission was created in order to put the federal budget on an automatic pilot to deficit reduction, long before the economy was in post-collapse recovery.
The premature pivot to austerity was a major factor in the Democrats’ record-breaking loss of 63 House seats in the November 2010 midterm election. As executive director of the Bowles-Simpson Commission, Reed was not only an austerity advocate himself. He brought on unpaid staffers from leading austerity organizations funded by Pete Peterson.
When Reed was named to a senior job in the Biden campaign last January, the Peterson-funded Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group bent on cutting Social Security, cheered. “We can’t think of a better person for the job,” CRFB said in a statement.
One of Biden’s first and most important decisions will be whether to give recovery priority over deficit reduction. If ever there was a time for large-scale, deficit-financed public investments, it is now. But the undertow of conventional wisdom, bad fiscal advice, and old Washington cronies remains potent.
We dodged a bullet when Reed was passed over for Biden chief of staff in favor of Ron Klain. How about a nice ambassadorship for Reed, maybe to a threadbare country that drank the austerity Kool-Aid?
If Biden has his head screwed on, he’ll keep this guy far away from White House policymaking.
