A Staffing Battle Awaits Kamala Harris If She Wins

Moderate Democrats are preparing to push for a bigger role in staffing the White House and key agencies if Vice President Kamala Harris prevails in November, setting up a battle with progressives who are hoping to continue President Joe Biden’s moves to upend decades of economic consensus on trade, labor and antitrust enforcement.

Leaders at Third Way, a centrist group, are preparing lists of staffers for a potential Harris transition and are determined to avoid a repeat of 2021, when they say progressive groups ended up winning personnel fights. “They were organized. We were not at all,” admitted Matt Bennett, one of the group’s co-founders.

“We took it on faith that Biden had run as a moderate and had won the nomination as a moderate,” Bennett said. The centrist faction believed that would “dictate the staffing,” he added, but “it didn’t.”

It was the pandemic that set the stakes: Amid the crisis, Biden cast his presidency as FDR-sized, with his eyes set on an activist government response to the pandemic akin to that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This search for FDR-sized responses to the crisis led Biden’s team to seek out those with FDR-sized answers.

Progressives did not come to dominate the administration in any way, but they have held influence in midlevel positions in economic agencies and councils across the government and, in some cases, led regulatory efforts and policymaking in a way they didn’t in other recent Democratic administrations. Now, progressives want to continue to expand on this agenda while the business-aligned wing of the party wants Harris to return to a more lax enforcement policy for corporate America.

So far, Harris’ political operation is remaining silent on any postelection intentions, leaving unresolved questions about which and how many open positions are even available for the two ideological camps to battle over.

“The campaign itself is properly focused on winning,” said Bennett. “They had zero interest in talking about this.”

That silence — whether strategic or viewed as necessitated by politics — has fueled an online and televised proxy war over the direction her administration will take. And while neither side feels secure in how it will actually shake out if she wins, progressives believe both that they are unlikely to be as successful as they were with Biden and that the policy changes set in motion over the last four years will be hard to dislodge — if Harris even actually wants to dislodge them.

“It’s much easier to not do something than it is to stop and reverse something,” said a progressive operative. “Overall, I’m somewhat pessimistic about who her people are, but I’m optimistic about how much she’s going to be able to do [in upending Biden’s accomplishments].”

Today’s battles are rooted in the early days of Biden’s presidency. Few thought the longtime senator from Delaware, a tax haven for the world’s corporations and big banks, would oversee a massive shift in economic policy aimed at wiping out the shibboleths of the past 40 years. But that proved to be how Biden governed after taking office in 2021.

He rejected the consensus economists by favoring a policy of full employment, backed industrial policy programs, and, perhaps most notably, hired policymakers who wanted to use their positions to take on corporate power and rewrite the rules of the economy to favor workers, consumers and jobs.

Biden would define the shift his administration brought about under the umbrella of “Bidenomics” in June 2023. Declaring a “fundamental break” from the governing economic consensus of the past 40 years, Biden outlined a program that hinged on a government-led industrial policy, a trade agenda to protect workers, and support for organized labor combined with vigorous antitrust enforcement.

The 2020 Democratic primary race seeded the ground for progressives to win a number of under-the-radar battles for positions in the administration. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a primary contender against Joe Biden, played a key role in moving the economic policy wonks in her orbit into power while the unity task force joined by Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Biden’s last primary opponent, helped as well. Biden insiders like White House chief of staff Ron Klain and former Sen. Ted Kaufman also opened the door for progressives.

Warren allies joining the Biden administration included Bharat Ramamurti and Jon Donenberg at the National Economic Council, Wally Adeyemo at the Department of Treasury, and Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And, in what came as a shock to the business world and Democratic donors, antitrust wunderkind Lina Khan was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission and then named as its chair.

Khan’s appointment rattled the business world. She, alongside the Department of Justice’s antitrust enforcer Jonathan Kanter, has adopted a complete rewrite of antitrust law, blocked major mergers and acquisitions by big-name companies like Nvidia and Microsoft, forced pharmaceutical companies to lower prices for inhalers, banned non-compete agreements, filed lawsuits against tech titans like Amazon and Meta, and challenged the power of pharmaceutical middle men.

This aggressive enforcement, not seen in decades, made her public enemy number one in C-suites across the business world and a personal nemesis of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative opinion page.

It’s no wonder then that Khan has emerged as the lightning rod in the looming fight over staffing a potential Harris administration.

Just days after Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris in July, Democratic megadonor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who is the subject of five separate FTC investigations, told CNN that Khan was “waging war on American business” and called for Harris to fire her. Barry Diller, head of the media empire IAC, followed up by labeling her a “dope” and said he’d lobby Harris to push her out. And last week, Dallas Mavericks co-owner Mark Cuban, who has emerged as a key surrogate for the Harris campaign, also endorsed removing Khan from her position.

This public pressure campaign from billionaire donors, however, forced the personnel issue into the public eye, creating a backlash. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) promised “an out and out brawl” if “anyone goes near Lina Khan,” after Cuban’s comments.

Mark Cuban “is wrong,” Sanders added.

“Lina Khan is enforcing the law, and I understand there are some billionaires who chafe at that,” Warren told HuffPost. “They have enjoyed decades of flaccid enforcement of the rules that might crimp their profits. But Lina Khan doesn’t work for the billionaires. I can’t imagine why any president would want to replace her.”

Progressives believe the anti-Khan campaign going public is a boon, as it makes it harder for Harris to remove the FTC chair without it seeming like she is doing the bidding of her donors.

“The person who is best positioned is Lina, in part because Reid Hoffman ran a very effective advocacy campaign on her behalf,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic nonprofit. “He turned it into a proxy fight for who she’s on the side of — consumers or corporations.”

Another figure who could emerge as a lightning rod on the other side of the divide is Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. With a history as a Rhodes scholar, venture capitalist and Rhode Island governor, Raimondo is known for wowing elites with her intelligence and has long been thought to have eyes on the Treasury secretary job. She’s popular with the business community and some Republicans and has a high-profile role implementing the CHIPS and Science Act, a bipartisan law directing government funds to support the construction of semiconductor factories on U.S. soil.

Progressives are raring up to defeat any effort to place Raimondo at Treasury, with the left-wing Revolving Door Project readying a website compiling a variety of attacks on Raimondo. But a Democratic source with knowledge of Harris and Raimondo’s relationship downplayed the possibility of her taking the job, noting Raimondo’s not-especially-great Monday afternoon speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.

The Revolving Door Project, and its founder Jeff Hauser, are frequent targets of moderate angst in these discussions. Originally founded to fight for progressive appointments in a prospective Hillary Clinton administration, the group has acted as a clearinghouse to advance left-leaning arguments about staffing and to pitch opposition research about centrist candidates for even the most obscure positions.

Hauser is unapologetic about his role and said the point of his organization is to advance progressive policy goals without actually seeking access from the administration. “A lot of the people who we’re going to be critical of are totally nice interpersonally, but we’re not looking to be charmed,” he said. “That’s the source of our freedom.”

Bennett did not rule out moderates responding in kind with their own public campaigns. “It depends on how public these decisions become and how long the process goes on,” he said.

Bennett said moderates’ goal is to make sure Harris doesn’t entirely block out people with business experience, noting President Barack Obama brought in Wall Street financier and deficit hawk Steve Rattner to work on the auto bailout. “We hope the Harris team doesn’t repeat being completely allergic to anyone from the business community being involved in government,” he said. “You need people who understand how the economy works.”

Moderates’ gripes over their lack of influence in 2021 have some revisionist aspects. Biden’s Cabinet included only two figures definitively identified with progressives — Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai — with the rest of the slots going to the mainstream Democrats. Other key officials, like National Economic Council Chair Brian Deese and current White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, came to the administration directly from the business world. Some of the administration’s positioning against tech companies, for instance, came not from Warren allies but from longtime Biden hands like deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed.

And progressives today do not feel like they have the same influence they had in 2021. There are fewer progressive champions on the Harris transition team, nothing like the Biden-Sanders working group to reach compromises, and no clear point of contact with Harris’ inner circle like the one Klain provided under Biden. They also see the business wing as much better organized than it was in 2021 when it got caught flat-footed.

“It’s too early to tell, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going that well for the 2.0 version of this,” Owens said.

Plus, those in the business and big donor community have put themselves forward in a way they did not at the beginning of the Biden administration.

Four years ago, they only got off their back foot months into the Biden administration — with campaigns to beat back the nominations of banking expert Saule Omarova to head the Office of Comptroller of the Currency and of communications law expert Gigi Sohn to lead the Federal Communications Commission. In both cases, bigoted smears — against Omarova for having been born in the Soviet Union and against Sohn for being gay — spurred Republican opposition, but Democrats like Sens. Mark Warner (Va.), Jon Tester (Mont.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), who has since registered as an independent, helped torpedo their nominations.

Cryptocurrency investors turned their ire on Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler for his efforts to regulate crypto as a security. The industry has plowed more than $200 million into a super PAC to defeat candidates — mostly Democrats — who back crypto regulation through the SEC. They have a key ally in Cuban, who has long opposed SEC litigation efforts and repeatedly called for Gensler’s removal.

They also see Harris as more open to business interests than Biden, with corporate-aligned allies in her inner circle. Progressives view this same dynamic with trepidation.

Tony West, Harris’ brother-in-law and the chief counsel to Uber, has taken a leading role both advising Harris and doing outreach to the business community. Karen Dunn, who helped prep Harris for her debate against Trump, is on Google’s legal team for the antitrust suit brought by Kanter and Khan. And then there’s Harris’ relationships with Cuban, who has floated himself to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, and venture capitalist Ken Chenault, who reports suggest could be considered to lead Treasury.

She has also endorsed a lower capital gains tax increase than Biden at the urging of business leaders and backed policy ideas suggested at meetings with private equity investors and corporate law firms, according to The New York Times.

That doesn’t mean progressives think a Harris administration will necessarily veer far from Biden’s program. She has close ties to organized labor, backs continued public investment in burgeoning and strategic industries, talks about certain antitrust policies on the stump, and strongly supports funding the care economy. And she has refused to break from the Biden administration’s record in any significant way.

“The Harris team understands that a really important part of what the Biden-Harris administration accomplished is because of the people they hired,” said Felicia Wong, president of Roosevelt Forward, the political arm of the progressive think tank the Roosevelt Institute, and a member of the Biden transition team in 2021.

Progressives hope those accomplishments of full employment; passage of landmark climate, infrastructure and industrial policy legislation; and even the resolution of the blemish of inflation back down to 2% without causing a recession speak for themselves.

The likelihood Harris will face a Republican-controlled Senate also points to continuity, as it would be easier to maintain Biden’s team than get her appointments through a hostile Senate.

This muddle leaves the business-aligned groups in the Democratic coalition feeling like they aren’t in any better shape than progressives to shape a Harris administration.

“The reality is our team and the left have much less ability to influence people at the very top of the administration,” Bennett said.

Part of both sides’ sense of being on the outside looking in is that Harris’ ascendance to the nomination came as a late surprise. She has had to stand up and run a campaign in a very short amount of time, and her focus has been entirely on winning.

While this looming personnel fight puts progressives in a potentially tougher position than in 2021, the changes wrought by Biden’s elevation of the new economic thinking back then have altered the playing field in their favor.

“The debate over the FTC or the SEC is taking place in a different environment than in 2008,” Wong said. “I don’t know which fights Wall Street will win, and which fights the antimonopoly or financial reform side will win. What I do believe is that every one of these debates is going to take place on the merits, and part of the evidence will be the case-by-case impact that corporate-driven decisions will have on jobs, wages and other things that matter to working people.”