Neera Tanden drops out of nomination for the office of management and budget

US President Joe Biden made a controversial choice of choosing Neera Tanden to preside over the Office of Management and Budget. On Tuesday she withdrew her name from the consideration after her confirmation collapsed last week, making Biden deal with his first major blow in his nominations to the Cabinet.

Biden in a statement said Tanden had dropped her nomination and he still would “look forward to having her serve in a role in my Administration,” indicating that he could still opt her to a position that does not require Senate confirmation.

Tanden led the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress for a decade, in the course of which she gained herself a stature as a partisan warrior who generally targeted Republican lawmakers on Twitter and clashed with progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The seasoned Democratic operative gained an outpouring of support for her nomination from outside groups, including the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce and labor groups, but her trail of brusque tweets targeted at members of both parties may have ruined her confirmation.

In a letter from Tanden withdrawing her nomination sent out by the White House, she said, “it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities,” said Tanden in a letter while withdrawing her confirmation sent out by the White House.

Being an OMB director, Tanden would have become the first woman of color and the first South Asian person to lead the powerful executive office and had an outsized role in shaping the Biden’s administration domestic policy.