Biden Cabinet Pick Calls Her Own Nomination Racist

Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge will reportedly be nominated as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in Joe Biden’s cabinet, just weeks after saying that nomination would be racist.

“As this country becomes more and more diverse, we’re going to have to stop looking at only certain agencies as those that people like me fit in,” Fudge told POLITICO last month. “You know, it’s always ‘we want to put the Black person in Labor or HUD.’”

Fudge, a Cleveland Democrat, was reportedly a front-runner to be Secretary of Agriculture.  While the Department of Agriculture is popularly thought of as a “farmers” department, most of the department’s work is in providing school lunches and “food stamps.”  As a member of the House Agriculture Committee, Fudge has been an outspoken advocate for these government assistance programs.

While five of the seventeen Secretaries of Housing and Urban Development have been black, there has never been a black Secretary of Agriculture.

While it appears Fudge will accept the nomination, liberals are criticizing the pick, citing Fudge’s apparent lack of interest in public housing programs.

Liberal media outlet The Intercept panned the pick, writing:

A cursory glance at the Ohio Democrat’s career makes clear that she has never led a public housing authority or developed an affordable housing complex. She did serve as mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, but she is not a trained urban planner or former advocate for indigent clients. She has neither represented tenants in housing court nor investigated the banks that fueled the foreclosure crisis. Nor has she managed a shelter for the unhoused, administered disaster relief grants, taught the complex scheme that governs federal housing on Native American land, or published research on housing market conditions. She does not appear to have ever filed suit to enforce the civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination in housing, though she did once work for a county prosecutor.

Fudge’s tenure in Congress reveals no interest in the housing universe. Since her first election to the House of Representatives in 2008, the Ohio Democrat has sat on three House committees: Education and Labor, House Administration (which does not work on housing), and, most recently, Agriculture, on which she chairs a subcommittee. Though a subcommittee on housing, community development, and insurance exists, this congresswoman has never served on it.

Liberals had hoped Biden would pick Fudge to lead Agriculture and expand government assistance programs, with The Intercept writing:

Fudge has leveraged her position on the Nutrition Subcommittee to advocate for maximizing the Department of Agriculture’s role in combating hunger. Two weeks after winning her seat a sixth time, Fudge was pushing for a 15 percent increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits through the next coronavirus relief bill. And just a year ago, she was fiercely opposing the Department of Agriculture’s proposal to cut billions of dollars from SNAP and drop 700,000 recipients from its benefits rolls. “The truth is the USDA is an agriculture and food agency, not a workforce agency,” Fudge wrote in a Washington Post opinion. “The president has cynically weaponized the USDA as a blunt political instrument, flying in the face of the department’s stated mission to ‘do right and feed everyone.’

…But the indignity of this cynical game isn’t always lost on its participants, and that includes Fudge…Yet this is where we find ourselves once more as an unenthused congresswoman gracefully accepts the consolation prize of being the first Black woman to lead a department whose mission she might have to research before her nomination hearing. A disappointing outcome, to be sure. Then again, is this not what the Biden-Harris camp promised us all along: a return to normal?”

Michael Brigham

Michael Brigham has written for American Action News since the summer of 2019. His areas of expertise include foreign affairs, government, and politics, but regardless of the subject matter, he has a nose and an insatiable appetite for news. In his free time, he enjoys reading nonfiction, watching a mix of comedies and true crime documentaries, and spending time away from the swamp hiking in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.