Susan Walsh/AP Photo
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, June 13, 2023.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Should Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris prevail in November, her transition team will immediately start making decisions about executive branch appointees. Senators, through their confirmation powers, can prevent certain executive branch personnel from being appointed. But not every member of a presidential administration is subject to Senate confirmation. There’s a lot at stake in who Harris taps to fill nonconfirmed roles, which is why it’s imperative for progressives to make their voices heard now. A month from now will be too late.
The Prospect’s David Dayen recently explained that several members of the Biden administration wouldn’t need another blessing from the Senate to continue serving in a Harris administration. This is an important insight because Republicans, who are at this moment likely to gain control of the upper chamber of Congress, would like nothing more than to hamstring the executive branch’s effectiveness by opposing Harris nominees. From Harris’s perspective, she can choose either continuity in personnel where appropriate, or chaos sparked by the same obstructionist GOP lawmakers who rejected qualified Biden nominees such as Saule Omarova and Gigi Sohn. The decision should be easy.
Notably, every member of Joe Biden’s Cabinet could keep serving indefinitely. Of course, some should be replaced, starting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who lied to Congress about Israel’s illegal restriction of aid to Gaza in order to keep U.S. arms flowing as Netanyahu’s apartheid regime commits a litany of war crimes. Harris can also keep Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan in place indefinitely, along with several other independent agency leaders, though the staying power of each one depends on the statute or their term in office. Furthermore, if a Republican-led Senate tries to veto Harris’s executive branch nominees, she has tools at her disposal—including the Vacancies Act and the recess appointment clause—to ensure that her administration is properly staffed and capable of executing its duties.
Read more from the Revolving Door Project
But beyond independent agencies and the Cabinet, there are many influential White House positions for which Senate confirmation is not required. Harris has no excuse for not taking her best swings here. In the same vein, progressives have no excuse for not advocating for the best possible nominees—and preparing to register disapproval if warranted.
As a general principle, Harris should appoint individuals who have a demonstrated commitment to furthering the public interest, rather than entrenching corporate power or seeking personal advancement. This means appointees’ résumés should reflect careers spent advocating for the common good—including experience in federal, state, or local governments as well as other public-sector or nonprofit work—as opposed to careers spent working on behalf of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and other nerve centers of corporate America. Moreover, given the need for an all-of-government approach to solving our myriad and overlapping crises, the people Harris names should also have the ability to creatively leverage available power to drive change.
What follows is a brief overview of key jobs and some lessons on what to look for—and look out for.
• White House chief of staff, deputy chiefs of staff, and special assistants: The chief of staff is a Cabinet-level official who exercises a tremendous amount of influence, as both adviser to the president and manager of the Executive Office of the President. The chief of staff’s duties range from selecting and supervising White House personnel to directing policy development and negotiating legislation with congressional leaders, Cabinet secretaries, and advocacy groups.
The night-and-day difference between Ron Klain and Jeff Zients, Biden’s first and second chiefs of staff, underscores the importance of getting this pick right. For two years, Klain worked constructively with the left wing of the Democratic Party—securing significant investments in clean energy and domestic manufacturing along with provisions to lower prescription drug costs and more resources to ensure the top 1 percent pays the taxes it owes—and he empowered progressive regulators to crack down on corporate wrongdoing. Since February 2023, super-rich former management consultant Zients has overseen a comparatively anemic Biden administration. Although losing the House in the 2022 midterms no doubt made the legislative side of Zients’s job tougher, that’s no excuse for failing to (a) tell a compelling story about Biden’s domestic accomplishments (including those that made Zients’s fellow plutocrats sad), and (b) convince voters that the Democratic Party has concrete plans to improve working people’s lives.
• National Economic Council: The National Economic Council advises the president on domestic and international economic policy and monitors the implementation of his or her economic agenda. The NEC is currently led by Lael Brainard. The Revolving Door Project sounded the alarm about Brainard when she was being considered for Treasury secretary, given her extensive record of supporting pro-corporate trade agreements during the Clinton and Obama administrations, from implementing NAFTA to calling the Trans-Pacific Partnership a model for future trade deals. However, as NEC director, Brainard has consistently defended Biden’s project of “growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up—not the top down” and not caused problems for reformer U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. Biden’s pivot toward pro-worker industrial policy represents a victory over the neoliberal consensus embodied by the likes of Larry Summers, a corporate stooge and Obama-era NEC director who should be prohibited from rejoining the federal government.
To quote Harris herself, “We’re [hopefully] not going back!”
• National Security Council: The National Security Council is “the President’s principal forum for national security and foreign policy decision making with his or her senior national security advisors and cabinet officials, and the President’s principal arm for coordinating these policies across federal agencies.” In light of the ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank (and civilians in Lebanon as well) facilitated by unceasing U.S. weapons shipments, it’s impossible to characterize the current NSC as anything other than an abysmal failure. Jonathan Guyer has detailed in the Prospect how Blinken (a WestExec alum), national security adviser Jake Sullivan (formerly of Macro Advisory Partners), and other members of Biden’s foreign-policy team “got rich” by moving between the worlds of public service and corporate consulting.
After the 2020 election, RDP joined dozens of other progressive advocacy groups in providing Biden with a dossier of 100 experts who could establish a more humane national-security apparatus than the existing one overseen by war hawks and arms industry insiders. Biden ignored us, but Harris shouldn’t.
• White House Counsel: Per the Federal Register, the Office of Counsel to the President “is responsible for advising on all legal aspects of policy questions, legal issues arising in connection with the President’s decision to sign or veto legislation, ethical questions, financial disclosures, and conflicts of interest during employment and post employment. The Counsel’s Office also helps define the line between official and political activities, oversees executive appointments and judicial selection, handles Presidential pardons, reviews legislation and Presidential statements, and handles lawsuits against the President in his role as President, as well as serving as the White House Contact for the Department of Justice.”
Biden’s counsels—Dana Remus (2021-2022), Stuart Delery (2022-2023), and Ed Siskel (2023-present)—have helped the president get lower-court judges confirmed at an unprecedented pace, and they’ve also advised him in the face of numerous lawsuits, often filed by Republican officials. Additionally, court reform and proposals to rebalance the Supreme Court will also come across the desk of the White House counsel. Given the Supreme Court’s devastating attacks on the administrative state as well as the GOP’s affinity for weaponizing the debt ceiling to extract regressive policy concessions, Harris must appoint someone willing to play hardball against far-right extremists.
• Domestic Policy Council: The Domestic Policy Council helps the president develop and implement a coherent domestic policy agenda across the federal government. Like the NSC, the DPC is composed of several Cabinet members and other officials. Since 2023, the DPC has been led by Neera Tanden, an alum of the Clinton and Biden administrations who previously ran the corporate-backed Center for American Progress. Before Tanden, Biden’s DPC was led by Susan Rice, another alum of the Clinton and Biden administrations. Rice faced criticism for multiple reasons during her tenure in the Biden White House. She was accused of creating an “abusive and dehumanizing” workplace in which she routinely berated colleagues, including Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. In addition, she came under fire for playing a central role in the Biden administration’s cruel immigration policies. Given the right’s ongoing assault on reproductive freedom and student loan relief, and in light of Harris’s stated goal of expanding the care economy, Harris should tap an unapologetic progressive to lead the DPC. Abortion rights, debt cancellation, treatment of migrants, and more are at stake.
• Senior Communications Staff: Biden’s comms team has been dreadful, to put it mildly. Most of the electorate is completely unaware of the steps the Biden administration has taken to push the economy in a greener and more equitable direction. Kate Bedingfield and Ben LaBolt, the former and current White House communications director, respectively, deserve a lot of the blame for the disconnect between Biden’s policies and voters’ perceptions. So does Anita Dunn, former senior adviser to the president for communications. These figures decided that the best thing to do when the Biden administration fights corporate power is to not let people know about it. (Or, if it is discussed, do so in the most abstract way possible designed to reduce the chance of a fight that might, God forbid, draw attention.)
Given the popularity of cracking down on corporate crime, that’s exactly the opposite of what should be done. And Biden’s senior comms staff hasn’t only failed to convey the president’s domestic achievements; they’ve also failed to adequately explain the extent to which profiteering corporations have fueled the cost-of-living crisis, allowing Biden to unfairly take heat for inflation. For example, the Biden White House has yet to publicly condemn Scott Sheffield, the Republican mega-donor who colluded with U.S. drillers and OPEC officials to limit the global supply of oil, which ultimately increased gasoline prices and augmented fossil fuel industry profits at the direct expense of working households. (The FTC cited a second public official for similar behavior this week.) What’s more, the White House has remained silent about Sheffield’s price-fixing conspiracy even as the Trump campaign courts Big Oil donors with pledges to repeal Biden’s climate and environmental policy rulemakings. Harris can and must do better.
If Harris wins, her transition team will be making decisions about these jobs in November. Progressives ought to weigh in now!
