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It does a disservice to Marcia Fudge as a public official to pressure her into a position she was not seeking.
Four years of Donald Trump has offered an extreme version of Washington policymaking as a slipshod, ad hoc lunge from one decision to the next. That’s more the norm than people maybe assume. There’s less of a grand design to modern politics and more of a series of haphazard events; this is why governing has struggled so mightily of late, in fact. The case of Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), President-elect Joe Biden’s apparent choice to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is a signature example.
Fudge didn’t want the HUD job, a fact revealed by someone close to the process—Marcia Fudge. She was openly campaigning to run the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as recently as a few days ago, and scornful of the idea that she could be pigeonholed as an inner-city Black Democrat. “As this country becomes more and more diverse, we're going to have to stop looking at only certain agencies as those that people like me fit in,” she told Politico last month. “You know, it's always ‘we want to put the Black person in Labor or HUD.’”
Marcia Fudge is now in HUD.
It’s actually been worse for Black policymakers than Fudge makes out. No Democrat has appointed a Black individual to run HUD since 1979 (Clinton and Obama did not have a Black HUD Secretary), and only one Black person in history has run the Department of Labor (Alexis Herman, under Clinton). That has triggered demands on the Biden transition to foreground diversity, to repay the debt to people of color who have reliably voted for mainstream Democratic politicians without receiving proper representation in return.
Fudge was intending to rethink the notion of how Black voices can be heard on policy. She set her sights on USDA, an agency whose primary function in terms of dollar amounts is actually to distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, sometimes called food stamps. She has been on the Agriculture Committee in Congress since entering Congress in 2008, and now chairs the Nutrition Subcommittee, the key oversight entity for SNAP distribution.
Fudge had powerful backers. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), single-handedly responsible for rescuing Biden’s presidential hopes in South Carolina, wanted Fudge at USDA, along with the Congressional Black Caucus. The choice came down to her, or former North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a top rural adviser to Biden during the campaign. (We know how Biden did in rural America, right?)
Impressions are being given that HUD and Interior are not important federal agencies but political chits to be handed out.
Heitkamp represented the corporate Ag establishment, a stalking horse for the big seed and meat processing and dairy conglomerates that have been mowing down family farmers for decades. When coastal liberals say that rural Americans vote against their own interests, they’re mistaken, because those interests are assuredly not being met by Big Ag and its backers. It’s led to hollowed-out communities, families giving up livelihoods that have lasted generations, and significant despair. That’s what the fight was about: Big Ag versus a new way forward.
Biden chose Big Ag.
It may look like a punt, because neither Fudge nor Heitkamp got the job. But the so-called “compromise” choice was Tom Vilsack, Ag Secretary under Obama for both terms. However, he is fully aligned with Heitkamp’s corporate Ag, export-driven strategy. Vilsack spent the past four years as a dairy industry lobbyist with a trade group called the U.S. Dairy Export Council; almost no other agricultural sector has grown more concentrated in that time, led by Dairy Farmers of America, a for-profit cooperative being sued by its own farmers for colluding to hold down milk prices.
I’ve talked to a lot of family farmers over the past few years, for my book and other reporting. Vilsack’s name is a four-letter word to them. At USDA, Vilsack promised to tour farm country and listen to family farm stories of monopolist abuse and intimidation. He listened and went back to Washington and did nothing but approve more mergers. Rules designed to ban Big Ag retaliation against small farmers and give them stronger legal tools to prevent abuse languished on Vilsack’s desk until the very end of his term, and when they were finally proposed, it was too late to finalize them. Trump’s USDA promptly rolled back the rules and dissolved the agency that would have enforced them.
“Vilsack already had his shot to ruin rural America,” said one Democratic farm activist who requested anonymity because of the need to work with the future administration. “People don’t understand how angry farmers are in Wisconsin at Obama and him for failing the dairy crisis.”
The optics of Vilsack pushing aside a qualified Black woman are particularly gross. While at USDA, he forced a deputy named Shirley Sherrod to step down after a coordinated right-wing assault due to a deceptively edited video. There’s also a sense that Vilsack failed Black farmers while at USDA, including foreclosing on their farms and failing to compensate them fairly in discrimination lawsuits.
But Vilsack had one thing going for him: a decades-long relationship with Joe Biden, going back to when he endorsed him for president while mayor of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, in 1988. Biden defended Vilsack in a meeting with civil rights leaders yesterday. Clearly that relationship is blinding Biden to the destructive force Vilsack represents in rural America. Though it may not get the attention of a Neera Tanden or Rahm Emanuel, this is easily the worst pick Biden has made, according to those who know his record. His tenure at the Dairy Export Council, says the farm activist, “should be just as rancid as Raytheon or Goldman (Sachs) or BlackRock.”
The only question for the Biden team was what to do about Fudge, who stressed her loyalty to the president-elect throughout the process. On Tuesday, Clyburn promised on MSNBC that Fudge would be in the cabinet, though she “may not be at Agriculture.” It turned out that she got HUD, as a sort of consolation prize.
Only HUD is a critical government agency, especially in the middle of a housing crisis due to the pandemic. Fudge was the mayor of Warrensville Heights, a middle-class Black suburb of Cleveland, and she has voted for affordable housing priorities on the House floor. But she doesn’t sit on any committee related to housing, and has no deep expertise in housing policy, unlike the number of people mentioned as possible HUD Secretaries (like former HUD official and former Jacksonville mayor Alvin Brown, CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition Diane Yentel, and several more).
Advocates who have been pushing the Biden administration to overhaul the way affordable housing is delivered in America were baffled by the decision. “We don’t know much about her thoughts on any of the relevant housing issues of the day,” said Maurice BP-Weeks with the Action Center on Race and the Economy, which has focused on HUD during the transition. “Everyone’s at a loss.”
It takes time to get up to speed; another former mayor, San Antonio’s Julián Castro, needed years to catch up on housing policy when he was installed at HUD, according to other advocates in the space. It does a disservice to Marcia Fudge as a public official to pressure her into a position she was not seeking.
Weeks noted that HUD just came off four years of leadership from Ben Carson, a surgeon who was not remotely qualified for the position. The career staff has now seen their agency get used as part of a political chess game for a second time. “It’s hard not to find it slightly insulting,” Weeks said. “I’m sure Biden would candidly say he was pushed by the CBC to make sure Fudge got something. But that’s not the racial justice we seek. It’s not someone, somewhere. Policy has to be important.”
If this were the only instance of a paint-by-numbers approach to cabinet diversity, maybe it could be written off. But last week, New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, according to a leak from the Biden transition, turned down an offer to become Secretary of the Interior. Lujan Grisham, a transition co-chair, was openly pining for Health and Human Services, where she has relevant experience, as secretary of health for New Mexico from 2004 to 2007. Not only was she not interested in Interior, two fellow New Mexicans—Rep. Deb Haaland and retiring Sen. Tom Udall—did want the job.
Biden’s team wanted Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo for HHS, and again offered a woman of color a consolation prize. When Lujan Grisham turned it down, Biden’s team wrote her off. But Raimondo then ran into scrutiny for her record on health policy and reproductive choice. She took herself out of the running. With the Congressional Hispanic Caucus mad about how the Lujan Grisham situation played out, Biden scrambled and nominated California Attorney General Xavier Becerra for HHS.
At the same time, Haaland, who would be the first Native woman in any cabinet, is being smeared by anonymous transition officials as lacking the proper “experience” to run the Interior Department. This would be despicable even if the transition didn’t offer someone without as much experience on Interior-related issues to run the same agency. Meanwhile, some on Team Biden are touting Michael Connor, another Native American who worked at Interior but is now a corporate lawyer at BigLaw stalwart WilmerHale, defending mining interests. Diversity will surely be touted as a factor if Connor gets the job, but there was a diverse and well-qualified candidate available, with overwhelming tribal support, who doesn’t have corporate clients.
Sometimes this works out fine—Becerra has a good record on healthcare. But the process seems broken. Records have taken a back seat to friendships and paybacks and diversity goals. People are not being set up to succeed. Impressions are being given that HUD and Interior are not important federal agencies but political chits to be handed out. And it augurs very poorly for governing in the Biden era, if it’s characterized by a lack of pre-planning and dashed-off ideas.
The various congressional caucuses are culpable here too. Nothing was etched in stone that Marcia Fudge had to be in the cabinet; lots of qualified Black people were available for HUD and other positions, and overall housing policy could suffer in the exchange. By foregrounding representation, you ultimately threaten the experience of those you seek to represent.
Biden sought throughout the campaign to return normalcy to Washington, to put adults back in charge and show that experience matters. That’s not how things are working out, and the process badly needs to get back on track.
