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Neera Tanden:

Biden Announces NRI Neera Tanden
As New Domestic Policy Adviser

Los Angeles, May 10, 2023
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/ A.Gary Singh

President Joe Biden announced that Neera Tanden will serve as the next head of his domestic policy council.

Tanden, a longtime prominent Democratic operative, will replace Susan Rice, who plans to leave the administration later this month. Tanden has spent the last year-and-a-half as senior adviser and staff secretary in the White House, after her initial nomination to run the Office of Management and Budget faltered in the face of Senate opposition.

“While growing up, Neera relied on some of the critical programs that she will oversee as Domestic Policy Advisor,” .........Read More

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NRI Neera Tanden withdraws nomination as Budget Head with  amid opposition key Democratic

Los Angeles, March. 03, 2021
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/ A.Gary Singh

New President  Joe Biden, suffered his first major setback in completing his Cabinet after the withdrawal this week of the nomination of  Neera Tanden to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget. 

Neera Tanden, has withdrawn her nomination after she faced opposition from key Democratic and Republican senators for her controversial tweets. Thirteen of the Twenty three Cabinet nominees requiring Senate approval have been confirmed, most with strong bipartisan support

 

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Democratic Convention turns spotlight on Indian Americans
  By Arul Louis 

Philadelphia (US), July 28, 2016: Three leaders from the Indian American community took the stage before the 4,765 national delegates and the national media as the Democratic Party Convention turned the spotlight on the community, recognising its rising role.

The president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Neera Tanden, made an impassioned speech on Wednesday in support of the party candidate for president Hillary Clinton, declaring: "Hillary will always have our backing."

She spoke candidly of her family's travails after her father divorced her mother when she was five and how the public safety net saved them and helped her eventually get an Ivy League law degree and to become Hillary Clinton's adviser and play important roles in her campaigns......READ MORE

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  • June 28, 2012

    Washington, D.C. – Today,  Neera Tanden, Counselor to the Center for American Progress Action Fund and President of the Center for American Progress, released the following statement regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act:

    The Supreme Court today merely confirmed what the Constitution and 200 years of precedent already made clear: The Affordable Care Act is without any doubt constitutional.

    The Court’s ruling is a victory for millions of Americans who are already benefiting from the health reform law, whether it’s the sick child who can no longer be denied insurance or the senior who can afford her prescription drugs. And very soon the law will go even further to protect tens of millions more from ever being denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition.

    We should not lose sight of the people who are benefiting from the health law—whose lives were at stake with the Court’s ruling. It’s not about Democrats or Republicans winning or losing, it’s about people’s lives. All of us—Democrats and Republicans—must move forward with making health care work for every American and that means stopping the political games and implementing the law. But will Republicans stop their politics-at-all-costs campaign long enough to make sure America’s health care system works for every American?

    No more slash-and-burn politics. No more delay tactics. Republican attorney generals have wasted millions of dollars using the courts to achieve their political ends. Today the court affirmed its role as the neutral arbiter of the law for all Americans.

    Even though the Supreme Court saw through the political gamesmanship, this ruling is a clear reminder of just how much is at stake with the Court and leaders placing politics before people.

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Neera Tanden

President of the Center for American Progress and Counselor to the Center for American Progress Action Fund

February 2, 2011: Neera Tanden is the President of the Center for American Progress and Counselor to the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Tanden has served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations as well as presidential campaigns and think tanks. Most recently, Tanden served as the Chief Operating Officer for the Center, leading strategic planning of the organization, managing all operations including all of the organization's finance and fundraising efforts, and serving as a key member of CAP's executive team. Tanden focused the organization on measuring the impact of the Center’s work and during her tenure as COO the Center’s financial position has been strengthened.

Tanden previously served as senior advisor for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services, advising Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and working on President Obama’s health reform team in the White House to pass the bill. In that role she developed policies around reform and worked with Congress on particular provisions of the legislation.

Prior to that, Tanden was the director of domestic policy for the Obama-Biden presidential campaign, where she managed all domestic policy proposals. Tanden also served as policy director for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign where she directed all policy work, ranging from domestic policy to the economy to foreign affairs, and managed day-to-day policy announcements. In that role she also oversaw the debate preparation process for then-Sen. Clinton (D-NY).

Before the presidential campaign, Tanden was Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at CAP. She was one of the first senior staff members at the Center, joining as Senior Vice President for Domestic Policy when CAP first opened its doors. In between, Tanden was legislative director for Sen. Clinton, where she oversaw all policy in the Senate office. In 2000 she was Hillary Clinton’s deputy campaign manager and issues director for her Senate campaign in New York. Tanden also served as associate director for domestic policy in the Clinton White House and senior policy advisor to the first lady.

Tanden currently has a regular column for The New Republic online and has appeared on the "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," MSNBC, CNN, and Fox. She received her bachelor of science from UCLA and her law degree from Yale Law School.

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Affordable Care Is Constitutional

Outlier Judge’s Ruling Does Not Invalidate Health Reform Law

By Neera Tanden |December 13, 2010

Today, George W. Bush-appointed district court Judge Henry E. Hudson, who has a financial stake in a major Republican consulting firm, ignored precedent, the consensus of his colleagues, and the Constitution itself to strike down an essential component of the Affordable Care Act. The result of this decision will increase costs for people and put insurance companies back in control of our nation’s health care system. Judge Hudson’s decision is also an outlier: So far, 14 judges have dismissed these meritless challenges to the health reform law.

The Affordable Care Act is nothing short of a lifeline for millions of Americans to receive the health care they need and deserve now and in the future as the law takes effect. It bans some of the worst insurance company practices, such as prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions and dropping coverage once a person becomes sick. To eliminate these abhorrent insurance practices, the law also requires people to purchase coverage. Without this provision, the insurance market becomes unworkable. Too many people will wait until the moment they become sick to purchase insurance, leading to skyrocketing premiums for everyone. That is why a wide range of economists and organizations representing patients with pre-existing conditions have urged the law be upheld.

Make no mistake: Judge Henry Hudson’s poorly reasoned decision is living on borrowed time. We at the Center for American Progress are confident that it will not hold up to further scrutiny.

Neera Tanden is Chief Operating Officer at the Center for American Progress and oversees the health care team at the Center. She previously served as senior advisor for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services, advising Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and working on the president’s health reform team to pass the bill.

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NRI appointed Hillary Clinton campaign's policy director of 2008 presidential election

New York, Jan. 26, 2007
Sudeep Bhalla
Neera Tanden, a senior vice president for Academic Affairs at the Center for American Progress, has been appointed Hillary Clinton campaign's policy director of 2008 presidential election.

Prior to joing Academic Affairs at the Center for American Progress Center, she was Legislative Director for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY). Before that Neera was the senior vice president for Domestic Policy for the Center for American Progress. Neera was the issues director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She has also served as the senior policy advisor to the Chancellor of the New York City Schools, Harold Levy. Prior to that she was the deputy campaign manager and policy director for the senate campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Neera also served in the White House under President Clinton as the senior policy advisor to the First Lady and associate director in the Domestic Policy Council.

She graduated from UCLA and received her law degree from Yale Law School in 1996. She began her political ascent by volunteering for then Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis’ presidential campaign in 1988. At age 18, she was a precinct leader and she encouraged all of the young people in the audience to get similarly involved no matter how young they were.

According to The American Prospect, Inc, she said: As George W. Bush grows accustomed to job-approval ratings in the middle 30’s, the number of explanations for his travails seems to increase by the day. In this case it’s not success, but failure that has a thousand fathers: the bungling of Katrina, his drive to privatize Social Security, the mistakes in Iraq, even obstructionist Democrats. The list goes on.

But here’s another theory: The president’s low approval ratings are the result of the intensely negative type of campaign he chose to run.

A campaign forms the basis for the public’s expectations of how the candidate will govern once in office. And Bush, instead of telling Americans what he had accomplished and what he would do once reelected, ran the most negative presidential campaign in history. He spent $177 million on the highest number of negative ads -- a whopping 101,000 -- and the lowest number of positive ads of any presidential campaign in modern time. And he was the incumbent! He won by the narrowest margin of any incumbent since 1828, but he won.

The focus on an almost purely negative campaign meant that he built little support across the country for his agenda. But Bush and his team failed to see this. Believing their own hype, they saw the election results as an affirmation of their key policies, but in fact they were nothing of the sort because those key policies were hardly even discussed. Social Security is the most obvious example. Sure, Bush mentioned privatization as part of his stump speech. But he discussed privatization just five times during the debates, while he mentioned Iraq 73 times. And The New York Times and The Washington Post ran only two stories apiece on the subject during the campaign. A campaign in which Bush had spelled out his proposals would have been a campaign in which we would have had an actual debate about privatization. But Bush kept his plans for Social Security intentionally vague during the campaign. He didn’t want the debate in the short term, but in the long term, he damaged himself.

On Iraq as well, Bush said the election affirmed his policy. “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,” he told The Washington Post. A year later, given the 35 percent approval rating for his handling of Iraq, clearly the American people wish the accountability moment had lasted a bit longer. It is obvious to all but the most partisan of supporters that the 2004 election was not an affirmation of President Bush’s Iraq war plan.

But there is a deeper way in which Bush’s campaign has dictated his downward trajectory.

In campaigns, the attacks that candidates make against their opponents define them almost as much as their positive agenda by creating a negative narrative of their opponents. Candidates use their negative message to highlight a contrast with their opponent that helps define themselves positively. Bush laid out a clear message about his opponent -- John Kerry was a flip-flopper who couldn’t be trusted to fight the war on terror. This reinforced his campaign’s narrative that Bush was strong and resolute and would not flinch. When Bush did something unpopular, he turned it to his advantage by saying he did what he thought was right and didn’t follow the polls. He wouldn’t be one to zigzag.

But now we see the downside of this message of resoluteness: Bush has made it difficult to change course to reflect new realities. And though he has made some changes in his time (he was against a new Homeland Security Department before he was for it), for the most part he has held on to failing policies despite changed circumstances. So he has stayed the course in Iraq despite ample evidence that this has made the occupation more dangerous for U.S. soldiers. Similarly, he has passed more tax cuts despite massive deficits, and maintained every member of his senior team even until one was indicted. What used to be resoluteness is now a stubbornness divorced from the reality Americans see every day. His inability to change course furthers the sense that he’s out of touch with people’s concerns.

When he does change course, it seems disingenuous and political. So, rather than receive a positive bump when he uncharacteristically apologizes for the mismanagement of Katrina, or withdraws his nomination of Harriet Miers, as most politicians would, Bush’s downward trajectory continues. If he changed course dramatically on issue after issue Bush would become that which he has maligned.

 

 

Neera Tanden

Neera was born in 1970 in NRI parents from India.

  • She graduated from UCLA in 1992 and received her degree from Yale Law School in 1996.
  • She is married to an artist, Ben Edwards while she was working on the Michael Dukakis campaign
  • She is the Chief Operating Officer of Center for American Progress since February 2010
  • Becomes President of Center for American Progress in November 2011.
  • Graduated from Yale Law School
  • Worked on domestic policy both on Capitol Hill and in Think tanks.
  • In 2008: She helped Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign shape its policy proposals
  • Worked on President Bill Clinton's for new energy policies and health-care reforms
  • She also worked for plan to end the Iraq War of President George W. Bush.
  • She was the domestic policy director for Barack Obama's campaign. She has also written on Indian-American affairs.

Neera Tanden - I was five when my parents got divorced and my mother was on welfare for two or three years and then she got a job as a travel agent.

  • And a few years after that, she actually got a job working at Raytheon as a contracts administrator and so by the time I was 11, she actually - we, she bought her own house in Bedford and so you know and I'm incredibly proud of my mom's accomplishments
  • . I mean you know she was a single Indian woman with two children and you know used a lot of resources to kind of pull herself up and make sure that I had a better life so.