Neera Tanden, a former senior White House official under President Joe Biden, told Congress she was authorized to direct the use of an autopen—an automated signature device—for signing official documents on behalf of the president. However, she admitted she did not know who gave final approval for its use in each instance.
Testifying before Congress on Tuesday for over five hours, Tanden—who served as Director of the Domestic Policy Council and previously as White House Staff Secretary—said the president relied on autopen signatures for pardons, memos, and other executive actions. While she had the authority to initiate the process, she acknowledged a lack of clarity on who finalized the decisions, according to a report from Fox News citing Oversight Committee sources.
Tanden explained that she would send decision memos to members of Biden’s senior team but was not always aware of what occurred between sending the memo and receiving it back with authorization to use the autopen. Despite this, she maintained that President Biden was in control of the decision-making process.
A Republican member of the Oversight Committee dismissed Tanden’s remarks, accusing her of misrepresenting the situation. A former White House official also pushed back, telling Fox News that “every executive action she presented to the president received written sign-off from him.”
“Any suggestion otherwise is a distortion of the testimony,” the official added. “To imply that Neera Tanden said President Biden did not approve every single executive decision is simply untrue.”
Tanden’s attorney, Michael Bromwich, supported this view. “The autopen was only used after the president had personally approved the decision,” he said in a statement. “At no point did aides sign documents on President Biden’s behalf without his authorization.”
The exchange comes amid increased scrutiny of how official documents are handled and signed in the executive branch, especially when automated tools like the autopen are involved.
