US President-elect Joe Biden with Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris. | Photo credit: Twitter
Key points
- As is the norm, once the presidential elections are concluded and the results are declared, the winning candidate begins to prepare the transition teams for the next government.
- Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as President and Vice President of the United States on January 20, 2021.
New York: In another major milestone for India, the Biden-Harris team appointed two more Indian-Americans to lead key teams to assist the new Democratic administration after Dr. Vivek Murthy was announced as co-chair of the Covid advisory board. 19 of the White House. together with Dr. Atul Gawande.
Gawande had in the past headed a committee of the health task force for former President Bill Clinton.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as President and Vice President of the United States on January 20 of next year.
Arun Majumdar and Kiran Ahuja have been named to the top of the Biden-Harris transition teams, along with many other American citizens of Indian origin.
Majumdar, director of the Precourt Institute of Energy at Stanford University, will lead the team that deals with the Department of Energy that designs, manufactures and tests nuclear weapons. His team includes Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a professor of physics at the University of California Berkeley. She is one of 21 Indian-Americans who have been appointed to different departments and agencies in the new administration.
Ahuja, a civil rights attorney who has served in the past as Chief of Staff in the Office of Personnel Management and as Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders under former President Barack Obama, has been appointed head of the team that will deal with the human resources agency of the US federal administration, the federal office of investigations on the civil service and the protection of whistleblowers, news agency IANS reported.
As is the norm, once the presidential elections are concluded and the results are declared, the winning candidate begins to prepare the transition teams for the next government.
However, Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration, has refused to accommodate the Democratic transition teams since the final official announcement of the results is still pending. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, has refused to accept the results against his favor, calling the polls “fraudulent.”
Other Indian-Americans on the Biden-Harris team
Sumona Guha, a former senior director of the US-India Business Council, had worked with Biden as Special Adviser for National Security Affairs when he was vice president. Now, she’s on the US State Department team.
Puneet Talwar he was undersecretary of state for political-military affairs during the term of President Obama and had worked on the nuclear agreement with Iran.
Dilpreet sidhu, a former career diplomat who served as special assistant to the National Security Advisor and a staff assistant to former Secretary of State John Kerry, will now serve on the National Security Council (NSC).
Pavneet Singh, who has held a position at the NSC and the National Economic Council, is also with Sidhu on the new team. Singh is an expert on China and was an advisor to Biden’s campaign. He has also been included in the Science and Technology Policy team.
Arun Venkataraman, a former director for India in the office of the US Trade Representative and director of policy at the Commerce Department in the Obama administration, is now on the Trade Representative and Commerce Department teams, according to the new report.
Pravina Raghavan Y Atman Trivedi will join Venkataraman on the trading team. Raghavan was an advisor to the US Department of Commerce for the Obama-Biden duo, while Trivedi was an advisor to Kerry when the latter headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Asha M. George He’s been inducted into the Department of Homeland Security team. She is a former military intelligence officer and paratrooper who served as a chief of staff on the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security.
Subhasri Ramanathan, an attorney who served as deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration and a senior adviser to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, will also join George on his new team.
Bhavya Lal has been included in the prestigious NASA team. He has worked in the past with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Other notable members of Indian origin in the new Biden-Harris transition team are Shital Shah (Education), Ashwin Vasan (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), Meena Seshamani (Health and Human Services), Raj De (Justice), Seema Nanda and Raj Nayak. (Labor), Reena Aggarwal (Federal Reserve), Divya Kumaraiah (Management and Budget), Kumar Chandran (Agriculture) and Aneesh Chopra (Postal Service).
