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WASHINGTON – One of the most urgent tasks facing a new president is assembling a core group of advisers to serve in the cabinet.
Donald J. Trump valued negotiators and personal wealth and demanded loyalty. In doing so, he created a cabinet of white men, mostly wealthy, with limited experience in government, mirroring himself. His administration was the richest of any American president: His secretaries for education, commerce, and the Treasury, as well as his first secretary of state, were worth a total of at least $ 1.3 billion and as much as $ 2.9 billion, according to the statements. financial.
President Biden has taken a different approach, turning to legislators with government experience for most of his cabinet nominees, many of whom he has worked with for decades.
The new president has also prioritized diversity by completing his circle of senior advisers. He is on his way to assembling the most diverse cabinet in American history. Biden has nominated far more women and more non-white cabinet members than Trump, and he has chosen the first openly gay person to be a cabinet-level secretary.
Here’s a look at some of their A-team lineups.
Treasury
Steven Mnuchin and Janet Yellen
Trump chose Steven Mnuchin, a wealthy financier with ties to Wall Street and Hollywood, to head the department that oversees fiscal, economic and debt policies. Mnuchin, who financed movies like “X-Men” and “Avatar,” took office with no government experience after serving as president of national finance for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He had spent nearly 20 years at Goldman Sachs and then became involved in hedge funds. In 2009, Mr. Mnuchin was part of a group of investors who bought a bank that had been seized during the 2008 financial crisis.
Biden turned to Janet L. Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chair with a long career in economics whose work is well known, including some two decades at the Federal Reserve. She was president of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration. She was confirmed as Treasury Secretary by a bipartisan vote of 84-15 and is the first woman to hold the position. Ms. Yellen is now responsible for helping Mr. Biden prepare the $ 1.9 billion stimulus package he has proposed, directing it through Congress, and, if approved, overseeing the deployment of aid money.
State
Rex Tillerson and Antony Blinken
Trump addressed Rex W. Tillerson, a globetrotting CEO of Exxon Mobil, who raised concerns from both Democrats and Republicans at the time about what appeared to be a welcoming relationship with Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia. At the time, Trump called Tillerson “a world-class player and negotiator” and saw Tillerson’s dominance of the oil business as an asset. “For me, a big advantage is that he knows a lot of the players and he knows them well,” Trump said at the time. “He makes big deals in Russia. He makes great deals for the company. “
Biden chose Antony J. Blinken, his closest foreign policy adviser and a long-time aide who began working at the State Department during the Clinton administration. Blinken was Biden’s national security adviser while he was vice president and helped develop the country’s response to the Arab Spring. He was also a key player in the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts to rally more than 60 countries to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Commerce
Wilbur Ross and Gina Raimondo
Trump chose Wilbur Ross, a wealthy investor and Trump campaign donor, to head the department, which comes with a portfolio of oversight of technology regulation, climate change policy and climate monitoring, economic data collection and advocacy. American industry. Ross made his fortune through private equity investments. At one point he was known as the “king of bankruptcy” for buying, restructuring and selling to steel mills and other industrial companies. He took office at age 79 with no government experience.
Gina M. Raimondo, governor of Rhode Island since 2015, has a background in both government and finance. Before becoming governor, she was a state treasurer and founded a joint venture that helped fund a number of startups. She has been a rising star in the Democratic Party and has been praised for her push to reopen Rhode Island schools during the coronavirus pandemic. He put public and private schools on the same schedule to simplify plans and opened rapid virus testing sites just for students and teaching staff. He also established a statewide contact tracing system for schools.
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Health and Human Services
Tom Price and Xavier Becerra
Trump chose Tom Price, a physician who had been a member of the Republican House of Representatives since 2005, to head the department with a focus on dismantling the Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama’s flagship legislation. When Price was chairman of the House Budget Committee, he supported plans to move Medicare away from its indefinite commitment to pay for medical services, a move that could have increased costs for some people. Republicans said Price would bring a doctor’s eye to the department, which they said was rife with heavy-handed regulations.
Biden nominated Xavier Becerra, a former California congressman and attorney general who, with a profile in criminal justice and immigration issues, was thought to be a more likely candidate for attorney general. But for years he has fought the Trump administration on health care, among other issues, including the environment, immigration, education and civil rights. A day before Biden took office, Becerra announced that he would join a group of 18 attorneys general to fight the final rule of the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, which scientists say is designed to block new ones. public health protections by limiting research the agency may consider. If confirmed, he would be the first Latino to hold the position and a leader in Biden’s battle against the pandemic.
Housing and Urban Development
Ben Carson and Marcia Fudge
For the sprawling housing agency that oversees rental assistance and housing voucher programs for low-income families, neither Trump nor Biden turned to someone with experience in housing policy.
Trump chose Ben Carson, a renowned retired neurosurgeon with no government experience who briefly ran against Trump in the 2016 primaries. He became one of Trump’s early supporters. As a child, Carson was sometimes dependent on public assistance, growing up in an impoverished part of Detroit. But instead of defending that aid, Carson sided with Republicans who believe welfare fosters dependency.
Mr. Biden’s pick, Marcia L. Fudge, has represented Ohio in the House since 2008, and is a former Speaker of the Congressional Black Caucus. Before that, she was mayor of Warrensville Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. Although she hoped to be Biden’s agriculture secretary, she said she would be honored to lead the housing agency. She has no experience working on housing policy, but has focused on food security issues as chair of the House of Representatives on Agriculture nutrition subcommittee.
Energy
Rick Perry and Jennifer Granholm
For the agency with a portfolio that includes oversight of the United States’ nuclear weapons arsenal, 17 national laboratories, and a host of energy research and development initiatives, including climate change programs, Trump turned to Rick Perry, a former Texas governor. . While Mr. Perry brought government experience to the job, he lacked a basic understanding of what the department he was destined to lead was doing. During a failed presidential bid in 2011, he even called for his removal. In his 2010 book, “Harto! Our Fight to Save America from Washington ”, Mr. Perry rejected the established science of man-made climate change and called it an“ artificial and false disaster ”.
Four years later, Biden elected Jennifer Granholm, an advocate for renewable energy development and a two-term governor of Michigan who is credited by some with pulling the state out of the 2008 recession. She has no experience in the department’s nuclear programs, But since leaving office, he has advocated for renewable energy as a way to help expand state economies, which Biden has focused on in his virus recovery plan. If confirmed, he will be a key member of Biden’s team of climate change experts who are in charge of tackling global warming.
Trump chose Betsy DeVos, a wealthy philanthropist, Republican fundraiser and a strong supporter of charter schools and vouchers, which allow students to use taxpayer money to pay for private, religious, and for-profit school tuition. . During his confirmation process in 2017, the Senate was so divided on whether he should take office that Vice President Mike Pence had to break the tie. Many educators felt that Ms. DeVos had a deep disconnect from public schools and questioned how she could handle such a large bureaucracy tasked with overseeing education policy. Neither she nor her children attended public schools.
Mr. Biden chose Miguel Cardona, the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Education, who attended public schools as a child and taught during his teaching career. He rose to become principal of one of the state’s schools, and later as state education commissioner oversaw more than 1,800 employees. If confirmed, he would be the first Latino to lead the department and oversee plans for children affected by the pandemic to return to school.
Environmental protection agency
Scott Pruitt and Michael Regan
Scott Pruitt, Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, came to office with experience challenging the agency’s regulations on oil and gas policy and an agenda to undo the Obama administration’s climate change efforts. Before taking office, he was Oklahoma’s attorney general, closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry. As attorney general, he was part of an effort behind a coordinated legal fight against the Obama administration’s climate rules.
Michael Regan, Biden’s choice to head the agency, is North Carolina’s top environmental regulator and is credited with the largest coal ash cleanup settlement in the country. He worked as an Air Quality Specialist at the EPA during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. If confirmed, Regan will help oversee the agency’s rebuilding four years after Trump dismantled half a century of pollution and climate regulations, and will diminish the science behind them.
