On the campaign trail, Joe Biden guaranteed his White House would "look like the country."
As he enters the White House, he's taking steps towards keeping that promise -- assembling a historically diverse slate of top-level nominees.
Sen. Bernie Sanders may have lost the race to be the Democratic nominee for president, but the independent from Vermont was still interested in joining President-elect Joe Biden's Cabinet in a role he feels passionate about.
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Sanders, who was tapped to chair the Senate Budget Committee, is focused on Biden's "American Rescue Plan" for coronavirus relief. When addressing reporters last week, he refused to state whether he would move Tanden’s nomination forward before a relief plan is finished.
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"I don't know honestly, we're working on it," Sanders replied, according to Punchbowl News. The outlet followed up with Sanders on Monday, asking him about the timing of Tanden's nomination.
"It's going on," Sanders reportedly said. After a second question on the subject, he remained vague.
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"Obviously, there's a process we're going to go through," he said. Sanders then left and did not respond to a third question, Punchbowl News reported.
When asked if Sanders had any timeline in mind for Tanden's nomination, a spokesperson from his office told Fox News they were "still figuring it out," noting that there has yet to be an organizing resolution for Sanders to officially become committee chairman.
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Sanders and Tanden have historically been at odds in the past, as the OMB nominee has close ties to Sanders’ 2016 primary opponent Hillary Clinton.
During the presidential primary in 2019, Sanders wrote a fiery letter to the Center for American Progress, which Tanden led, accusing her of "maligning my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas."
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The Vermont senator, a self-described democratic socialist, also criticized a video by ThinkProgress, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which accused him of changing his rhetoric on wealthy Americans after he became a millionaire back in 2016.
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This bad blood seemingly runs deep. In 2019, The New York Times reported that Tanden, years earlier, had punched Faiz Shakir, Sanders' 2020 campaign manager, "in the chest." The incident allegedly occurred in 2008 after Shakir, then-chief editor of ThinkProgress, questioned Clinton about the Iraq War, an issue that had plagued her presidential campaign. Tanden told the Times that she "didn't slug him, I pushed him."
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