Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
John Podesta, then Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, in October 2016
Joe Biden’s record on transition personnel can certainly be described as mixed, and we’ve certainly gone to great lengths to describe it in that fashion. But one positive development has been the climate and environment team announced late last week.
Environmental groups across the spectrum are generally excited about the team, which includes progressive first-term congresswoman Deb Haaland at Interior, former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm at Energy, North Carolina environmental department chief Michael Regan to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Brenda Mallory as head of the Council on Environmental Quality, former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy as White House climate adviser, and Ali Zaidi, a movement environmental leader, as McCarthy’s top deputy.
Haaland, the first Native American interior secretary, was a priority for progressives, and she defeated internal skepticism from some in the transition, who anonymously derided her experience in executive management. (She ran the New Mexico Democratic Party, so this was always bogus.) She can be expected to overturn many of the damaging policies of the previous regime, including blocking new leases for fossil fuel production and restoring national monuments that were savaged under Trump. The Department of Energy is really a nuclear weapons management service, but its ARPA-E division (and a new climate-focused one called ARPA-C) could be leveraged to produce groundbreaking green technology, and Granholm has been a leader on the transition to renewables. (Yes, she’s gotten campaign funding from utilities, but she took that and placed renewable requirements on those same companies.)
Regan was a fallback choice after California air quality board chair Mary Nichols fell out over claims of inattention to environmental justice (which environmentalists in California dispute). He gets decent reviews locally for his efforts, being good on coal ash cleanups, while having more trouble countering North Carolina’s prodigious and pollutant-heavy hog-farming sector. But his will likely be an implementation role, with McCarthy and John Kerry in climate-related White House positions.
The successful rollout has pleased climate activists, leading some to tout the value of progressive advocacy in forcing Biden’s hand. There’s no question that progressive focus on personnel has led to far better outcomes than when Obama put a corporate- and bank-friendly Cabinet together with little resistance. Most of the worst names have been sidelined, and Monday’s announcement of Elizabeth Warren’s top policy director, Bharat Ramamurti, to a consumer protection and finance job within the National Economic Council was further proof of an entryway for progressives, however limited, into the upper echelons of power.
On the environment specifically, progressives and advocates do appear to have had success. But I have to mention the presence of one of the most influential and important members of the Democratic inner circle, someone at the heart of practically everything in the party for the past 30 years even though he sometimes gets forgotten: John Podesta.
It was Podesta’s email in-box, of course, that got released in the WikiLeaks hack in 2016, leading unstable individuals to summon up a conspiracy about Podesta, a Washington-area pizza shop, and a fantastical sex-trafficking ring. But the array of material in that leak was only possible because it was Podesta’s in-box, given his centrality within the party.
He bounced between Capitol Hill, the White House, and K Street in the 1980s and 1990s, as the Podesta Group (co-founded with his brother) became one of the most important lobbying firms in the country. He served as chief of staff to Bill Clinton and chief counselor, kind of a shadow chief of staff role, to Barack Obama. He chaired the Obama-Biden transition; he chaired Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and spoke in her stead on election night. In between, he created the signature government-in-waiting think tank for mainstream Democrats, the Center for American Progress. There’s almost nobody in a major position of power within the party without a few degrees of separation with John Podesta.
And Podesta has for many years styled himself as a climate hawk. Pretty much the only public statements Podesta has made in recent weeks have been to praise the Biden transition’s climate-related picks. Brian Deese, the former Obama administration official and BlackRock executive who will become Biden’s National Economic Council director, took over for Podesta as Obama’s climate adviser, and Podesta went to bat for him when Deese’s selection was taking incoming fire from progressives.
Finally, Neera Tanden, Biden’s choice for budget director, is the head of the think tank Podesta founded, and the two have worked together closely for many years. While he holds no formal role in the transition, it’s clear that Podesta, unsurprisingly, has plenty of juice with Team Biden. The “Podesta seal of approval” is intended to confer progressive bona fides on nominees. Jennifer Epps-Addison of the Center for Popular Democracy was specifically told Tanden was chosen because she was a progressive “movement leader,” which really misreads the moment and only makes sense if you classify “movement leader” as “recommended by John Podesta.”
For Podesta, climate issues have been a means to gain purchase among a segment of the left.
For Podesta, climate issues have been a means to gain purchase among a segment of the left. This is not to doubt the sincerity of his beliefs on climate. But it has enabled Podesta to escape whatever role he has played over the past 20-plus years in Democratic policymaking, a time filled with disappointing, half-hearted results.
It has also obscured his previous tenure in the Podesta Group, a lobbying firm at the center of indictments from the Mueller investigation, so much so that it had to be shut down. John Podesta hasn’t been involved in day-to-day operations with the firm since 1993, but the Podesta Group certainly benefited from having a power broker in top Democratic circles. For a long while in Washington, the Podesta clan (including Tony Podesta’s ex-wife Heather, a top lobbyist) has been Democratic royalty.
In the climate arena, that may have done much good, for the Biden administration and for the world. This empirically looks like a team that understands the urgency of climate action. And Biden has become a convert, making climate one of his “Build Back Better” pillars and consistently foregrounding it among his priorities.
But this also must come with the recognition that John Podesta likely had a lot of influence in selecting the next generation of Democratic policymakers. The Biden transition, for all its haphazard, will produce a Cabinet that’s several ticks to the left of Obama’s. But the lingering influence of hangers-on and old hands may not prove the best way to signal a fresh start.
