Originally published by The 19th.
For the first time, a woman of color is the director of what President Joe Biden called “the nerve center of government.” The Senate voted 61-36 on Tuesday to confirm Shalanda Young’s position as the head of the Office of Management and Budget.
“As evidenced by the strong bipartisan confirmation vote she received, Shalanda Young is well known to many of us due to her years of experience on the House Appropriations Committee staff,” said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who supported Young’s confirmation. She added: “Shalanda is smart, fair, and knowledgeable. I look forward to working closely with her.”
The Biden administration is on track to be the most diverse as promised. In addition to Young, more than a dozen of Biden’s chosen leaders are the first in their community to hold a position, including Kamala Harris, Janet Yellen, Deb Haaland and Katherine Tai. On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order on advancing racial equity through the federal government and directed the head of OMB — the office Young now formally takes over — to coordinate these efforts in the budget and across agencies.
Young is familiar with the office: She began serving as acting director in March 2021. Her confirmation process began toward the end of last year and took about 110 days — longer than the average time it took previous administrations. It took the Senate 103 days on average to confirm a Biden nominee, 100 for Trump, 80 for Obama and 48 for Bush. Presidents are required to fill about 4,000 politically appointed positions, including more than 1,200 that require confirmation in the Senate. The process entails a formal nomination from the White House, a Senate committee hearing and then a full vote on the Senate floor to formally confirm the nomination. Young is one of nearly 300 positions that have been confirmed thus far, according to Partnership for Public Service’s tracker.
The confirmation vote came the same day one of Biden’s more high-profile picks, Sarah Bloom Raskin, withdrew from consideration for the Federal Reserve Board’s vice chair for supervision. Raskin, who has previously served on the Fed and in the Obama administration, faced Republican opposition in part because of her willingness to address climate change through policy. She joins several other nominees, most prominently Neera Tanden, who were unable to clear Republican objections.
The Biden administration had initially nominated Tanden, the former president of the Center for American Progress, to serve as director of the OMB. However, the White House pulled the nomination after Tanden faced strong opposition in the Senate and was instead named White House staff secretary in October.
“[Young] earned the trust, respect and admiration of Democrats and Republicans alike,” Biden said when announcing her nomination in November. “In her eight months as acting director of OMB, she’s continued to impress me and congressional leaders as well.”
Young, who previously worked for the House Appropriations Committee, has been acting director of the agency since March 2021, overseeing the president’s budget and vision across the executive branch. In her confirmation hearing, Young said “a budget is your values” and “the federal budget can and should help make the promise of this country real for all families.” She described growing up in a Louisiana town with a population of around 2,000 — the same town where her maternal great grandparents lived and had her grandmother in 1928.
“Somehow, even then, in the segregated South, my great grandparents sent their child, my grandmother, to college,” Young said. “I am grateful they prioritized education — a commitment that has stayed in my family for generations. All families deserve to see their children have that same opportunity to pursue their potential.”
Last fall, Young went on maternity leave following the birth of her daughter —which was mentioned as an advantage at her Senate Budget Committee hearing on February 1.
“Working moms have felt some of the worst of this pandemic — and at a time when a full-blown child care crisis and the lack of a strong national, paid leave policy has been especially hard for working moms, forcing so many to turn down extra hours, promotions — or quit entirely,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington said at the hearing. “I can’t think of anything more appropriate than putting a working mom in charge of America’s budget.”
Murray, a Democrat who said she has known Young for years, characterized the new mother as a “steady hand” with years of experience negotiating across the aisle, who would help revive the country’s crippled economy. Young has previously voiced support for increasing the federal minimum wage, decreasing student debt, expanding Medicare eligibility, guaranteeing 12 weeks of paid parental leave and making child care more affordable.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.