Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With Allie Bice Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina In March of 2018, longtime Democratic operative BRUCE REED visited Facebook headquarters to sit down with COO SHERYL SANDBERG and ELLIOT SCHRAGE, the company’s policy chief at the time. The meeting was contentious. Reed, who’s involvement in the meeting was not previously reported, came to discuss privacy and protecting children with prominent tech critic JIM STEYER, the founder of Common Sense Media, where Reed was a senior adviser. In an interview, Steyer said that the pair saw Facebook CEO MARK ZUCKERBURG briefly, “but we really met with Cheryl and Elliot, the people who ran Facebook, right?” Steyer said that Sandberg and Schrage seemed to think Reed would be more reasonable and moderate. “[B]ut the truth is we agreed, and we were totally on the same page,” Steyer said. “We said, ‘Why are you doing kids messenger? And why are you letting the Russians use your platform to spread misinformation and disinformation?’ We asked them all sorts of things that did not make them happy.” Months later, Steyer and Reed were key architects of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), one of the most far-reaching pieces of tech industry legislation passed by a state at the time. The measure faced opposition from, among others, Facebook. Now Reed serves as President JOE BIDEN’ s top policy adviser, and the experience he gained working on the CCPA and meeting with tech leaders like Sandberg is informing the federal approach to the social media behemoths. Starting during the transition last fall, Reed has taken the lead on Biden’s tech policy personnel choices. To the pleasant surprise of many tough-on-tech left-wing activists, the Biden administration has chosen a slate of adversarial appointees, including LINA KHAN as FTC Commissioner, JONATHAN KANTER for the assistant attorney general for antitrust, and TIM WU on the National Economic Council. “I think that the roster of appointments in this space were initially what we'd have expected from Warren or Sanders’ presidency,” said SARAH MILLER, the executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project and a proponent of rigorous antitrust enforcement on tech companies. “Yea, it’s a surprise,” said MATT STOLLER, a fellow antitrust advocate and author of Goliath, a book that makes the case for going after monopoly power. To some progressives, Reed’s role is particularly surprising. Reed has long been derided in left-wing circles as a neoliberal, triangulating squish who will always steer center. During the transition, left-wing voices lobbied hard against him becoming chief of staff or the head of the Office of Management and Budget. One group even did some tilted polling to show his resume made him unpopular. And Reed does have a centrist record. In the 1990’s, he was an advocate for a bipartisan restructuring of the welfare system during the Clinton administration and worked on the 1994 crime bill. During the Obama administration, he served as staff director on the Simpson-Bowles commission which called for cutting Social Security in order to help reduce the deficit. But his defenders say that progressives’ caricature of him is wrong, or at least incomplete. “I wouldn't call them an ideologue. I think he's a really intelligent, really caring, thoughtful, progressive person, but he also wants to get stuff done, not just talk,” said Steyer. “He's an effective problem solver, who puts people first and he's willing to make strategic compromises in order to get landmark stuff done.” Reed’s aggressive posture toward tech is not just because it’s a progressive cause du jour but because he sees a bipartisan consensus forming around the issue that makes action possible. “I think there's an emerging consensus that it’s long past time to hold the big social media platforms accountable for what's published on their platforms, the way we do newspaper publishers and broadcasters,” Reed said at a Georgetown University forum this past December. “We can't sit back and let the Fourth Industrial Revolution cast the American worker aside and gut the middle class.” As for his work on CCPA, Reed compared it to the “taking on the railroads in the 1890s.” Reed has been particularly critical of Facebook. “Mark Zuckerberg makes no apology for being one of the least responsible chief executives of our time,” he wrote in a book chapter with Steyer on the future of tech. It was re-published by Protocol last winter with the headline, “Why Section 230 hurts kids, and what to do about it.” Some of Reed’s advocacy is unknown because he intentionally keeps a low profile that belies his influence in the Biden administration. In meetings when Reed is absent, Biden is known to ask versions of “Has Bruce signed off?” or “What does Bruce think?” We’d like to know what Bruce thinks too, but when asked if Reed could speak for this story, deputy press secretary ANDREW BATES looped in RON KLAIN ’s communications adviser, REMI YAMAMOTO, who then did not respond. TOMORROW, TOMORROW — POLITICO is hosting its first ever tech summit Sept. 15th on the intersection of Washington and Silicon Valley, touching on issues like antitrust, online misinformation and data privacy. Register here to attend and submit questions. Alex will be co-moderating the “Rebooting Washington and Silicon Valley Relationship” panel with antitrust guru LEAH NYLEN. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you ZAYN SIDDIQUE, Reed's senior advisor? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. | 
