**JULY 24, 2020**

Kuttner on TAP

Biden's Cabinet and the Thin Progressive Bench

****

This is the point in the campaign when progressive groups begin
assembling lists. What's colloquially known as the Plum Book

is the list of the more than 7,000 appointments that a president gets to
make.

There are groups making lists of progressives for Plum Book jobs, as
well as lists of prospective Cabinet officials. Here is a particularly
thoughtful one, from Data for Progress
.

The most instructive item is the list of progressive nominees for
Treasury secretary. The Treasury secretary needs to know all the
byzantine details of the plumbing of how the financial system
works-and also the abstruse details of the accumulated
financial-engineering abuses that need to be remedied.

What's interesting is how short is the list of plausible candidates.
Wall Street has had such a lock on Treasury secretary and related
subcabinet jobs for so long that the bench is rather thin. Under Carter,
Clinton, and Obama, lefties simply did not get these posts.

Heading the Data for Progress list is Sarah Bloom Raskin, a genuine
progressive who served both as a governor of the Federal Reserve and as
deputy secretary of the Treasury. She's perfect, with both a deep
understanding of the plumbing of the financial system and a commitment
to reform. As an Obama administration appointee, Raskin doesn't seem
all that scary. But she is almost a category of one.

The other proposed nominees are Richard Cordray, former head of the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; former labor secretary and
renaissance progressive Robert Reich; and Columbia economist Jeffrey
Sachs, a notable expert on sustainable development and critic of
financialized globalism.

Any of them would be great. But the usual suspects would veto them as
not sufficiently versed in how the Treasury works. Indeed, the typical
definition of that requirement virtually limits it to Wall Street
veterans.

It's time to rebuild the progressive bench, so that we have a more
plausible farm-team system. Only by breaking the Wall Street link and
lineage can progressives take back the government as well as taking back
the presidency.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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