Anyone following the presidential transition closely knows that Neera Tanden, the President and CEO of the Center for American Progress (CAP), is taking incoming from all sides after being tapped by President-elect Joe Biden to be director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
What is not as well known is that another of Biden's recent economic picks is also under fire: Heather Boushey, the President, CEO and Co-Founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Here is more from Bloomberg:
Heather Boushey, named by President-elect Joe Biden as a member of his Council of Economic Advisers, was criticized on Tuesday by a former employee who alleged she was pushed out of her job after publishing a blog post that Boushey didn’t like.
Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist, worked at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth that Boushey leads but left the position in October, two months after publishing a viral blog post that claimed racist, sexist and elitist harassment in the economics field.
“I no longer see Heather Boushey as committed to diversity and inclusion,” Sahm wrote in the post published on her blog.
She says she was subject to performance reviews following her initial post, and that Boushey never replied to a request to meet after the essay went viral.
Five staff members left Equitable Growth from 2014 to 2015, citing her management as a factor for their resignations. That’s according to an internal Center for American Progress document in 2015 and disclosed in the WikiLeaks hack of the personal email of John Podesta, a founder of CAP and the Center for Equitable Growth. Equitable Growth was started at CAP in 2013.
Should Tanden and Boushey ultimately get the nod to work in the Biden Administration, both CAP and Equitable Growth will need to choose new leaders.