Neera Tanden on Building a Progressive Think Tank and Influencing Policy
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Twenty years ago, there was a lot of hand-wringing among progressives about how the right was winning the war of ideas. Conservative donors had built up a complex of big well-funded think tanks—like the Heritage Foundation, Cato, and the American Enterprise Institute—that served as powerful incubators and broadcasters of right-wing policy proposals. And for years it seemed like progressives just could not compete. For whatever reason, foundations and donors on the left weren't willing to invest a lot of money in building major think tanks. This put progressives and Democrats at a disadvantage because think tanks play a really important role in ideological movements, one that a lot of people don't understand.
The best of these institutions work on a wide range of issues. They operate at the intersection of scholarly expertise on the one hand, and real-world public policy, on the other. They develop new ideas and weave them together to tell an overall story about how to move America forward. And they can also engage in political battles nimbly, offering intellectual backup to allies in government and social movements, and the media. Yet for years during the 1980s and 1990s, progressive struggle to build powerful think tanks, one major milestone in changing that was the creation of the Center for American Progress in 2003.
Today, CAP has a budget of more than $50 million a year. You'll see CAP's people and policy ideas all over the place. Most recently it's been playing a role in helping shape the agenda of the new Biden administration. Neera Tanden is one of the people who helped found CAP, working with John Podesta. And she went on to serve as its president. She's been in the news a lot lately since Biden nominated her to lead the Office of Management and Budget. I talked with Neera for my podcast, "Inside Change," before that appointment was announced. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below.
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This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
David: Thanks for coming on the show.
Neera: Great to be with you.
David: Before we look forward and talk about the new Biden administration. I want to take a few moments to look back. You were involved in founding the Center for American Progress over 15 years ago. You’ve been deeply involved in building CAP ever since, including almost 10 years as president. It’s now one of the biggest think tanks in Washington, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the goals behind the founding of CAP and how much you think you’ve achieved those goals.
Neera: That’s a fantastic question. The first and primary goal of the Center for American Progress was to develop the next generation of ideas. So, we were founded in 2003 and I’m pretty proud of the fact that if you look at our prospectus back in that day—
David: I read it! I read it when it was first circulating back in 2003.
Neera: The analysis and the goals I think have been relatively spot on. Infrastructure had really leaned right because of the kinds of institutions that existed and that there was no balance on the center-left. The multi-issue, multi-disciplinary organizations were really dominated by the right. AEI, Heritage, Cato—all were organizations that had policy teams across issues, spectrums, and heavy funding behind them. And until CAP was founded, there was no organization on the progressive side that had that kind of infrastructure and that looked at issues across the spectrum.
So the goal was both to do analysis, but also to provide ideas about what public policy should look like into the future. I think we’ve been successful in ideas generation, but also a kind of deeper analysis over the last several years. We’ve really tried to analyze power and the connection between power and policy, whether it’s a tax on the right to work or democracy itself, we’re analyzing both.
Ideas that we’ve put forward have been the building block of proposals that Joe Biden campaigned on. We made those ideas available to everybody. Obviously, they’re all on our website. There’s a healthy mix of ideas CAP proposed, whether it’s developing a national childcare plan or really detailed plans around how to address the climate crisis that the Biden campaign, and hopefully the Biden administration, will follow up on, although there are obviously significant challenges with the Senate.
David: You mentioned being a counterweight to the right. Of course, the Heritage Foundation has been the longtime flagship think tank on the right. Do you think that there’s now a level playing field—that progressives have built enough think tank infrastructure that they’ve pulled par in terms of that kind of intellectual and policy firepower?
Neera: I don’t think the sides are evenly matched in the sense that there is so much more infrastructure on the right. Alongside CAP, there are organizations like the Roosevelt Institute and Demos, and other organizations like that. All of us together don’t equal the amount of financial investment in Heritage, AEI and Cato. There remains a large-scale imbalance.
Having said that, I like to think that CAP punches above its weight, and so I think that we have the significant ability to move issues on the center-left and we’re able to get a hearing for all of our ideas.
David: CAP’s budget last I checked was around $50 million a year. The Heritage Foundation has a budget of around $100 million a year. Pointing to that enduring gap, I wonder why is it that progressive funders won’t make these bigger investments in think tank infrastructure to the degree that funders on the right have?
Neera: I think that there are a lot of funders that tend to think in the shorter term. They tend to think electorally or issue-wise. Many liberal foundations structure themselves to be issue-focused so they have programmatic teams that are issue-focused and don’t think about how a more ideological response makes progress. And this is a big challenge in the debate because, as we all know, people often aren’t just motivated by individual issues; they’re influenced by a strong ideological response.
I’ll just take one example, which is whether people believe the government can work effectively or is corrupt. It’s kind of a central element to whether you’re willing to believe in anything the government does, right? Whether it’s healthcare expansion or tackling climate change, it’s a kind of a baseline issue whether people are going to support any kind of collective action through the government. Those are a set of issues we [at CAP] do a lot of work on, but it’s hard to raise money for that. It’s hard to get individuals or foundations very invested in that kind of building-block work that affects issues across the board. And I think that’s a significant challenge for us. It would be great if people change their orientation.
David: And of course, there’s no better place where that’s illustrated than in the courts, where the right has invested over the last 30 years in building up the Federalist Society; it’s a $30 million-a-year organization. Every conservative funder kind of tithes to the Federalist Society because they know that’s necessary to move their agenda in the long term.
Neera: Or, more importantly, it’s important to block a progressive agenda in the long term. And I think there is a difference, which is that a lot of conservative funders just think much more ideologically. And a lot of liberal funders just think much more issue-wise. I think one of CAP’s strengths is that we are thinking across issues, connecting different issues. So, a lot of the work we’ve done in immigration policy has been about how good immigration policy helps our economy. A lot of the work we’re doing on climate right now is around the economic arguments of climate and how it makes economic sense to address the climate crisis. And I think that’s just harder to get funding on these sets of issues, but hopefully, that will change.
David: And I also think the way funding flows from the foundations exacerbates the problem because they give a lot of project support for specific issues and they don’t give the kind of general operating support that a lot of conservative funders do.
Neera: Absolutely. And I think also the programmatic teams get invested in funding at a program level. It can operate a little like committees on Capitol Hill, which is, people are focused on their jurisdiction and issues that cross committees get less attention.
David: So one of the ways to get around this problem of project support is you go to wealthy individual donors who give that general operating support. CAP has done quite well in that regard; you’ve had support from a couple of billionaires. You have a very high-powered board of funders and others. And of course, that also has been a subject of criticism. CAP has been criticized as a proxy of corporate Democrats. David Sirota, for example, wrote last year that the “Center for American Progress has been bankrolled by corporations that actively work to undermine and destroy the progressive movement.” These are not new arguments.
Neera: I hasten to add they’re completely false arguments, but yes.
David: So how do you respond to those kinds of criticisms?
Neera: All of our corporate support is general support. It’s not funding particular areas of research, it doesn’t go to pushing one team to do something. So I reject that out of hand. The reality, also, is we have lots of support from wealthy individuals and those individuals are giving general support to the institution to be the flexible institution that it is. One of the reasons why CAP has the impact that it does is because we can move resources to issues as they move. Just to take a recent example: efforts by the Trump administration to undermine the electoral process before the election. There’s work we could do in that space because we have general support from large-scale individual donors. They’re trying to move the progressive agenda writ large; they’re not giving to this or that issue.
I’m very proud of how we’ve raised resources to be the institution we are. It’s CAP policy that the financial interests of any funder—individual, corporate or foundation—should not influence, let alone dictate, what our work is.
David: We’ve certainly covered in Inside Philanthropy how a lot of money from progressive billionaires and other wealthy donors goes to all sorts of groups on the left. And I do think it’s a complicated story because you have to wonder, well, how much can these institutions criticize the capitalist system that is producing the wealth that the donors have made and are deploying?
Neera: I think that’s fair. I would say from my experience, though, that liberal wealthy donors—whether they’re billionaires, multi-millionaires, or less—tend to be more liberal on these issues than the mainstream of the Democratic Party. CAP had unapologetically called for massive tax increases on the super-wealthy for, oh, I don’t know, a decade before I became president. We have a robust agenda today about how to get at the wealth that is untaxed in the system.
And I have never had a conversation with a liberal donor to CAP that says we’re doing too much on tax increases on the wealthy. These people are supporting Democrats who all support massive tax increases on the super-wealthy. So I have to say, I think there’s a misunderstanding here. I think there’s a presumption that those donors skew right on issues and they, in many ways, skew left. And again, if CAP’s ideas on taxing wealth should be realized, we would have much less inequality in the country.
David: I’ve written often about how the super-wealthy are now as polarized as the rest of the country, ideologically, in many ways.
Neera: There’s still a lot more billionaires that are conservative, so we should recognize that.
David: Yeah. But there’s the bad rich and the good rich, and then there’s sort of people in between. You just have to look at how the Biden campaign raised record amounts of money for a candidate who had the most progressive tax plan for raising taxes on the rich of any general election candidate, probably since FDR.
Neera: Absolutely. And my experience with wealthy people who are involved in politics and policy is that they are worried about the direction of the country and are willing to sacrifice taxes on themselves for that reason. The reorientation of the Democratic Party isn’t so much about billionaires. In the last election, the Democratic Party has done much better with white, college-educated voters who tend to be wealthier, and many of them believe their taxes would go up. And they voted for Biden because of other reasons, whether it’s the racial division or social division, or that Trump is a chaos machine.
David: Yeah. Well, “What’s the Matter with Connecticut?”
Neera: Exactly. I saw that. And we should recognize this is not just an American phenomenon. What has happened across the world, particularly between the United States and Europe, is that there’s been a realignment between the parties, across the sort of traditional dimensions. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton did much better with white non-college workers and did very poorly with white college-educated voters. And that has reversed itself. Joe Biden won where Hillary lost because he did a lot better in the suburbs, white, college-educated voters. There is a deep chasm in the country, but white, college-educated voters have become more liberal.
David: I want to get into the question of the progressive coalition in a moment. First, one last point about infrastructure. There’s been a huge growth of progressive infrastructure, a big Trump bump. What do you see still missing out there?
Neera: You have the rise of a broad set of voices. There are a lot of new additions to the progressive infrastructure over the last four years, whether it’s groups like Sunrise Movement or Data for Progress, or there are organizations that are more to the left of CAP.
I think that there’s a need for thinking through policy and then also messaging around those policies. So, for example, I think that there’s a broad consensus in the Democratic Party and center-left around reforming the police. There’s a police reform bill that the House passed over the summer that lots of moderates voted for that transformed accountability for policing, whether it’s addressing qualified immunity or other issues. But I do think that there are slogans that pop up like “defund police” or “abolish ICE.” And I think there’s no one talking about ending border enforcement or defunding the police.
There needs to be a mechanism for talking about public policy. The right takes unpopular positions and then comes up with a language that makes them popular. The death tax is a prototypical example of that. Progressives in the last few years have managed to take issues that have popular support, like reforming police departments so that they treat all communities equally, and taking unpopular slogans to address them.
I think that’s a mistake as a matter of actually achieving your policy. I think that there’s a need to think through those issues. And I also think social media has created a situation where people tend to live in information bubbles across the ideological spectrum and tend to think that “how I perceive an issue because I live in a city where everyone is very liberal” is the way things are. And I think that is a broad-level challenge. I’m not saying I have to convince a Trump voter to agree with me, I just think it’s important to know that a Trump voter thinks in a certain way and it may be that my most progressive policy is not going to convince that person.
David: Progressives are now going to go from a position of being the opposition and the resistance to having real power in the White House and the executive branch. CAP was often described during the Bush years as being a kind of government-in-waiting, the same thing was often said about it during the Trump years. In fact, during the Obama years, a lot of CAP people went into the administration. How’s it going to go this time? How much do you see people from CAP going into the Biden administration? How much are you working with the Biden team now?
Neera: Well, I think we have a fantastic staff, so I’m hoping several of them—but not all of them—go into the Biden administration. CAP’s teams have been developing a positive agenda over several years. I’m particularly proud of the work we’ve done on coronavirus response, and there’s been a lot of overlap between our proposals and the Biden team’s. Our teams have been working with the transition for a while now on policy, and I imagine a fair number of our folks will go into the Biden administration. But there’s going to be folks who go in from a range of institutions from Roosevelt and Demos and other institutions, as well.
David: I wonder how CAP is going to strike the balance, the sort of insider-outsider role. You’re very close to the Biden administration. You’ll have some of your people there. You’ve advised it in a lot of areas. And yet, as an independent, progressive think tank, you want to be out there pushing, you want to play that role of advocating for bolder action and bigger thinking and ideas. So how do you straddle those two roles, insider-outsider? Will you be willing to criticize the Biden administration when it needs to be criticized?
Neera: Sure. During the Obama years, there were many times I got calls from people in the White House upset about something we would do. I would have to say, “we disagree.” And we played a constructive role in, not just Obama’s agenda coming in 2009, but his agenda in 2012, 2014, and I think that’s a really important function for us here, as well.
David: One big difference between 2009 when the Obama administration came in and today is that there is a much stronger, independent progressive movement. When Obama came to power, it was an organization infrastructure he had created. It essentially dissolved when he came into the office.
This time around, you have a lot of very effective organizations that are out there that have come up, particularly in the last four years. They have some very strong ideas of what this administration should do, very detailed policy proposals. So I think we’re going to see a lot of pressure on the administration. There already is. How do you see that playing out? What’s healthy disagreement and what’s unhealthy or toxic infighting—and how do you know the difference? There are fears that tensions within the progressive coalition could escalate, that keeping it together could become more difficult and that could cost us in the 2022 midterms.
Neera: Yes, that’s true. One thing to think about, a key difference between liberals and conservatives, is an attachment to governing. I think liberals want to govern and are willing to negotiate. I worked on the Affordable Care Act and we had to make some very hard choices on immigration and abortion to pass that bill. And these were trade-offs that I didn’t think were the greatest trade-offs and felt uncomfortable making, but we needed to do that to pass the bill. Trump could control his party because he scared them. Democrats don’t have that same ability.
David: You mentioned Twitter, and it is a part of the problem in American politics writ large. It’s certainly part of—
Neera: I think Facebook is a much bigger problem in America than Twitter, although both are challenging.
David: It seems like Twitter’s maybe a bigger problem in the progressive coalition. And I noticed you’re on Twitter a lot. I don’t partake much myself, but—
Neera: That’s healthy. I’m trying to participate less, post-election.
David: I just find it distracting and it does seem to be a kind of driver of these internecine battles. Everything’s kind of reduced to 280 characters. A big driver of creating Blue Tent is that we want to create an entity where some of these differences can be hashed out more productively. How do you see trying to get people to listen to each other better, communicate more respectfully, have more productive conversations about some of the very real differences within the progressive coalition?
Neera: I think the most useful thing is having forums where people can talk privately. Honestly, it’s my experience in the last several years that the biggest problem—I mean, there are lots of problems with Twitter—but in terms of navigating coalition politics, is that people will run to Twitter and not have a conversation with each other. Over the last four years, I’m proud of the relationships we’ve built with some of the organizations that have risen up and just be able to say, “if you have a question or concern about what we’re doing, pick up the phone.” What happens in coalition politics is that people are doing things all the time and when you have a question, you pick up the phone and call them and ask them why they’re doing it. And sometimes, there’s an easy and understandable explanation.
David: I do hope that we can have more productive conversations.
Neera: I think there’s an urgent need for those conversations. I think having people from across a spectrum come together and learn from each other and understand things and understand where their presumptions are right or wrong is really important.
David: Listening goes a long way. So Neera, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been great.
Neera: Thank you. It was fantastic. Thank you so much for having me.
