Neera Tanden served as the Director of the U.S. Domestic Policy Council and as domestic policy advisor to President Biden. Tanden also served in the Obama and Clinton administrations and has worked on numerous presidential campaigns. She also previously held the role of President and CEO of the Center for American Progress and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, one of the nation’s largest think tanks. The HPR sat down with Tanden in October 2024 for a short discussion on policymaking in the era of social media and hyper-partisan politics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: What policies do you think are most crucial to addressing the widening economic disparities exacerbated by the pandemic, and how can these policies gain traction in a divided political landscape?
Neera Tanden: I’m proud that in the last four years of the Biden administration, inequality has actually decreased, but we do know that there are real challenges families are facing, particularly with higher costs. Our focus on the Domestic Policy Council has been to lower costs that families face in a variety of ways.
First and foremost, an issue very close to my heart is health care. We’ve given the power to Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time, something I’ve worked on for 30 years — dating myself a little bit there — and we finally are accomplishing that. The Department of Health and Human Services will negotiate the price of the first 10 drugs. They treat conditions like diabetes and blood clots, and we’re seeing a 50% to 70% reduction off the list price.
We’re also obviously working on college costs, student debt. A significant focus for us is also housing costs. Rents dramatically increased during the pandemic. They’ve stabilized, but they are still significantly higher than they were before the pandemic. So we have focused on trying to build supply. The president is committed to increasing supply by 2 million units and also making it much more affordable through a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. We’re really trying to focus on ways in which families are facing significant costs and address those costs at all.
Harvard Political Review: In an age of increasing skepticism towards government institutions, what can policymakers do to rebuild public trust in the government’s ability to solve major challenges?
Neera Tanden: I think that this is a healthy debate. There’s a question of whether when the government delivers, it actually makes a difference that people really believe in. Honestly, I think that will be tested in this election. I’m not here to talk about politics in any way. I’m bound by the Hatch Act. I do think that there are forces that are stronger that really drive polarization.
I could talk at length about social media and the effects of social media, but I think there are forces that when I started in Washington 25-30 years ago, that we didn’t really have to deal with back then. The level of misinformation, disinformation, and interests focused on driving anger and hostility towards the federal government has increased. I think this has been crystallized in the fact that you have FEMA workers who have to be protected from militias, because those militias have been told the FEMA workers are out to get them, are actually hurting them. So I just think that that’s a thing that we should all be worried about.
One aspect of this is that social media allows people to live in a cocoon, and when you live in that, the surround sound is all negative information about this nefarious federal government trying to hurt you. It really does drive a lot of fear. I have strong views on what we should do on social media, Section 230, and other things.That’s a really big challenge not even just the federal government, but is fundamentally a challenge for democracy. Part of democracy is that you live with other people and don’t think that they are out to destroy your life. You just need some basic bonds of social trust.
