In returning to the Center for American Progress last week as president and chief executive, Neera Tanden landed just where she had left off when she departed the influential liberal think tank four years ago to join the Biden administration as a top domestic policy advisor.

But while her homecoming was heralded by the center as crucial to developing a new Democratic agenda to help counter President Donald Trump, it also came as a tacit rebuke of Patrick Gaspard, who led the organization in Tanden’s absence and is now serving as a distinguished senior fellow.

The center made no mention of Gaspard in its announcement of the leadership change. But two people familiar with the situation confirmed to Jewish Insider that his move to a largely titular role was not voluntary. Instead, he was pushed aside to make room for Tanden, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

The demotion comes as Gaspard’s stewardship of CAP, which consistently failed to fundraise sufficiently to meet its roughly $50 million annual budget throughout his tenure, had fueled what one source with knowledge of the matter called a growing sense of “discomfort” among board members as well as “discontent” from donors about a lack of attention to fundraising.

“The kindest thing I can say about him is he was not putting basic time and attention into his fundraising responsibilities,” the person told JI, noting that CAP “was on a very unsustainable path” when it chose to replace Gaspard.

In a brief phone conversation with JI on Thursday, Gaspard denied he had been forced to relinquish his position leading the nonprofit. “This is categorically false information,” a CAP spokesperson added in a statement. “Patrick is an important part of the CAP family, and we are thrilled to continue our important work with him.” 

Earlier this month, 22 staffers were laid off, representing nearly 10% of its workforce. The attrition has been deeper than previously reported, with six veteran staffers also “pushed into retirement,” one person familiar with the matter told JI earlier this week. In 2023, at least one board member, the financier Eric Mindich, also left the nonprofit, disclosures show. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

The center is hardly alone among progressive think tanks now facing financial hardships in the wake of Trump’s victory last November, as Democrats have struggled to land on an effective messaging strategy to win back donors and excite voters while looking ahead to the midterm elections.

But some critics of Gaspard’s tenure said he struggled to build a strategic vision for CAP, which was founded more than two decades ago and has long boasted of crafting policy blueprints that led to the Affordable Care Act and the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, among other claims to mainstream authority.

In his time atop the organization, Gaspard notably embraced a hostile approach to Israel and the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, even as the nonprofit had, during Tanden’s tenure, struck a more balanced note on Middle East policy that had been viewed favorably by pro-Israel activists.

Gaspard, a former Obama advisor who led George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, grew increasingly critical of Israel as the war continued. In addition to calling for the suspension of U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, he accused the State Department of “gross disregard of overwhelming evidence” in concluding that Israel had been abiding by international law in its fight to eradicate Hamas.

Perhaps most controversially, he called into question the two-state solution as the best path to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an interview with Politico last year, a position he later walked back, insisting his comments had been mischaracterized. In the same conversation, he also suggested he did not view Israel as a democracy and drew a parallel between the Israeli government and apartheid South Africa — where he served as a U.S. ambassador during the Obama administration.

By contrast, Tanden, a veteran Democratic operative who helped implement the Biden administration’s national strategy to combat antisemitism, embraced a more friendly position toward Israel while at CAP, even as she weathered some intra-party feuds over Middle East policy that have increased in recent years.

In 2015, for instance, CAP faced backlash from the left when Tanden chose to host a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not long after several Democrats had boycotted his speech to Congress in which he criticized President Barack Obama’s efforts to broker an Iranian nuclear deal.

Pro-Israel activists, however, appreciated Tanden’s decision to engage Netanyahu in a dialogue, despite differences on some key issues.

A spokesperson for CAP said that Tanden was not available for an interview with JI. “As CAP has done before,” she said in a statement last week, “it will develop an agenda to build a resilient coalition and take on the Trump administration’s assault on core American values and its harms to Americans from all walks of life.”

More recently inside CAP, Gaspard’s strident criticism of Israel stoked muted objections, said a person familiar with internal dynamics, citing a “silent minority” of employees who disagreed with his views and positions but did not feel comfortable speaking up about a politically charged topic.

However his views were received internally, the center’s approach to Israel and the broader Middle East under Gaspard “didn’t really move the needle” from a policy metric, according to Brian Katulis, a former longtime senior fellow at CAP who built its Middle East program and left the nonprofit in 2021, the year Gaspard took the helm.

Katulis, who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said he believed that CAP in recent years lost much of its analytical rigor as it favored advocacy while catering to the activist left. “The quality of the work declined because it was driven by an advocacy approach as opposed to analysis,” he said in an interview with JI. “Quite often those kinds of things aren’t aimed at building coalitions to get things done.”

As Tanden reassumes her perch at CAP, Katulis said he is optimistic his former boss will set a new course for the struggling nonprofit now seeking to navigate Trump’s second term. “It gives some hope to folks who actually want to offer an alternative vision,” he said.