Shaun Donovan, who has served as OMB director under President Barack Obama and talks regularly with career officials at the agency, said the damage is deep and widespread at the agency.
“I’ve seen these moments over and over, and there’s no comparison,” Donovan said of the presidential transitions in the past. “It’s easily the most dangerous and has the deepest damage to repair.”
In the first three days of the new president’s office, the Biden administration’s administration has given its power to oversee federal spending and released more than $ 27 billion for critical services temporarily frozen by Trump’s recent request for spending cuts. has Rob Friedlander, co-director of communications at OMB.
The Trump administration has shifted power to political appointments, away from high-ranking career officials who traditionally hold it, POLITICO reported for the first time last year.
“We are fully committed to leveraging the talents and expertise of the entire OMB team,” Friedlander said, “especially the incredibly dedicated and experienced career staff – to get on the president’s agenda and ensure that our government work for all Americans. ”
During the Trump administration, the share of OMB employees who said they did not agree that the agency’s “senior leaders maintain high standards of honesty and integrity” had grown to about a third of the agency’s employees by 2019.
A former senior OMB official who has served under both Democratic and Republican presidents said that “instead of OMB being a source for the White House,” the Trump administration “turned OMB into an instrument of the White House . ”
“And that’s a whole other thing,” the former official said. “It’s a dangerous thing.”
OMB will have its hands in every part of Biden’s agenda – drafting its first budget proposal, reviewing and approving all federal regulations before they go into effect and overseeing issues of financial management, federal procurement and information technology.
But the agency’s workforce apparently did not have ‘much gas left in the tank’, the former official said. ‘You have a staff that is tired. They’ve been running for four years and running in directions they don’t actually believe in. I do not know that they will have the necessary energy to react in the way the Biden government once expected an OMB to react. . ”
The administration of Biden is staffing and announcing a large number of political rents this past weekend.
Topher Spiro, who led the health policy work at the Center for American Progress, joined the agency as co-director of health. Danny Yagan, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, will be co-director of economic policy, after advising Pete Buttigieg during his presidential presidency. Law professor Sam Bagenstos of the University of Michigan has joined as a board member.
The government in Biden also convened two former collaborators of the Senate Budget Committee at OMB. Michael Linden, who was a senior policy adviser to Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) On the panel, joined the agency as a senior adviser. Bobby Kogan, former chief mathematician for the committee, will serve as adviser.
Under Trump, one of the biggest criticisms of the budget office is that it acted as a rubber stamp for the Oval Office, destroying precedents in the service of the president’s agenda. While OMB has drawn up creative interpretations among administrations in the past to push through initiatives and regulations that may present challenges or legal problems, former officials argue that they usually serve the greater being.
When Trump called on the budget office in 2019 to suspend aid to Ukraine after proposing that the Eastern European country investigate Biden, career staff balanced on the political appointments it had made anyway, and the move motivated the resignation of at least two civil servants. The government’s accounting office later said the freeze on aid – which fueled Trump’s first indictment – was running rampant under federal budget law.
The outgoing director of the OMB, Russ Vought, said this week that the Democrats’ requests that the budget office should be reversed across different policies amount to continuous congressional handover and aiming of the executive branch’s authority to manage the taxpayer wisely. ”
“The Biden administration will have to decide whether they will run the executive or be run by the legislature,” he said in a statement.
Under Biden, the budget office could soon be run by a longtime assistant to the legislative branch. The new president has appointed Shalanda Young, outgoing chief of staff and clerk for the Home Affairs Committee, as deputy secretary at OMB under Neera Tanden, who has a broad base of policy expertise as a politician, and president of the Liberal Center for American. Progress.
It is expected that the cessation of OMB’s congressional investigations will come to an abrupt end once Young and Tanden are confirmed, rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, said in an interview.
“Neera understands the role of OMB and how critical it is, and she will want to do things with a united Democratic government,” Yarmuth said. “There should be no conflict. There should be no tension. And I’m looking forward to it. ”