With President-elect Joe Biden taking office in just five days, he has confirmed his final nominees to serve in his Cabinet and other cabinet-level positions. Biden has picked a very diverse cabinet, with almost all races having some representation in his Cabinet. Among the 15 Cabinet-level department secretaries, five are female and seven are nonwhite.
The diverse Cabinet is a sharp turn from President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, which largely consisted of white men. In fact, with Elaine Chao, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, and Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Secretary, resigning, there are no females or people of color serving as any of the 15 department secretaries.
Of the 22 people serving in Biden’s Cabinet (including other Cabinet-level positions), there are 10 women, four Blacks, one Native American, four Hispanics, two Asians, and one individual who identifies as LGBTQ. That gives a much larger swath of Americans representation in the incoming Cabinet. (This does not include Vice President Kamala Harris, as even though she is part of the president’s Cabinet, she does not serve at the pleasure of the president.)
Let’s now go through each of these 22 nominees.
Secretary of State: Antony Blinken
The Secretary of State is the highest-ranking Cabinet official (excluding the Vice President) and serves as America’s top diplomat, heading the powerful Department of State. Biden has chosen Antony Blinken to fill this position. He previously served as a deputy secretary of state and was a deputy national security adviser under Obama, and was also a national security adviser to the vice president under Biden. He is also a global affairs analyst on CNN.
Bliken has praised the normalization of relations with Israel by many Arab nations brokered by the Trump administration but criticized that administration’s decision to leave the Iran Nuclear Deal. He also previously criticized Trump for helping China by “weakening American alliances, …, abandoning our values and giving China the green light to trample on human rights and democracy from Xinjiang to Hong Kong.” He also called for stronger U.S. economic ties to Taiwan. Unlike Biden, Blinken does not support the Citizenship Amendment Act, which he believes discriminates against Muslims. He supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and also argued for arming Syrian Kurds to defeat ISIS, and believes Turkey to be an important U.S. ally.
Secretary of the Treasury: Janet Yellen
Janet Yellen, a white, 74-year-old woman, is Biden’s pick to head the Treasury and also advise on major financial matters. Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chair and vice chair, has served in the Federal Reserve since being appointed onto the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by President Bill Clinton in 1994. She is a “dove,” and believes in government spending to alleviate depressions and large monetary policies and low interest rates (i.e., demand-side economics). She also believes a low unemployment rate to be better than a low inflation rate.
Secretary of Defense: Lloyd Austin
Biden has chosen Lloyd Austin, a Black man, to lead the Department of Defense. He is a retired four-star U.S. Army General, and also served as the commander of the U.S. Central Command. Austin will be the first-ever Black man to head the Department of Defense and oversee America’s 1.3 million active-duty service members, and well over 2.8 million total employees at the federal department’s largest and most expensive bureaucracy.
Since Austin retired from the military just four years ago, he will require a congressional waiver to be granted to allow him to serve as the defense secretary, under the National Security Act of 1947.
Attorney General: Merrick Garland
If the name Merrick Garland sounds familiar to you, that’s because he was chosen by Obama to fill an empty Supreme Court seat in the final year of his term, but the Republican-controlled Senate refused to even hold hearings to appoint him, choosing to let the next president, who turned out to be Donald Trump, to appoint a justice instead. Merrick Garland is the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the nation’s second-most important federal court, and he has held this position for the past seven years. He has worked as a judge in the D.C. Circuit since 1997. Joe Biden has appointed Garland to be the U.S. Attorney General, the head of the Department of Justice, and America’s top prosecutor.
Garland will be expected to deal with a number of controversial issues, including deciding how (if at all) to investigate President Trump with regard to the Mueller report, tax fraud, and other related crimes and even possibly inciting the insurrection at the Capitol last week. He will also have to resolve the department’s unusually harsh treatment of Black Lives Matter protestors under the Trump administration and bring back morale to the department.
Secretary of the Interior: Deb Haaland
Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., a Native American woman, has been tapped by Biden to be the first-ever Native American to lead the Interior Department. The choice is significant as the Interior Department is responsible for the administration of programs relating to American Indians, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians, as well as protecting and managing federal lands and natural resources. Appointing a Native American to this position could help relieve the many issues plaguing Indian reservations, such as extreme poverty.
She would also be responsible for determining where natural resources are allowed to be harvested and used and is likely to halt many of the Trump administration’s waivers to allow drilling and other environmentally-damaging projects to continue in protected or delicate areas. Haaland is a progressive who supports both the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.
Secretary of Agriculture: Tom Vilsack
Tom Vilsack, Obama’s secretary of agriculture and former governor of Iowa, is Biden’s pick to lead the Department of Agriculture. Although Vilsack has experience in leading the department, the choice was a disappointment to many as many had hoped for a person focused on alleviating discrimination in loans and other USDA assistance programs. Many people thought Vilsack had not done enough to fix these problems when he served under Obama, and his inaction had lead to the continued increase in the racial wealth gap. Also, his role in the Pigford lawsuits, a series of civil rights lawsuits where Black farmers sued, in a class-action lawsuit, the USDA for disproportionately denying or delaying loans to Black farmers.
Secretary of Commerce: Gina Raimondo
Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island was tapped by Biden to lead the Department of Commerce, a department with wide-ranging responsibilities from managing interstate trade and commerce, setting industrial standards, taking the U.S. Census, forecasting the weather, and more. Raimondo is decently popular, reducing the state’s unemployment rate drastically, cutting regulations, raising minimum wage, and financed a large infrastructure program.
She will be responsible for implementing a lot of Biden’s international trade agenda, including moving away from the heavy tariffs favored by Trump.
Secretary of Labor: Marty Walsh
To lead the Department of Labor, Biden has picked Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. The role includes chairing the department responsible for enforcing and suggesting laws regarding workplace standards, labor unions, and other such matters, providing unemployment benefits, setting wage, hour, and occupational safety standards, and more.
Walsh, a former union organizer and a former Massachusetts State Representative, is popular with union workers.
Secretary of Health and Human Services: Xavier Becerra
Biden has picked Xavier Becerra to be the first-ever Latino to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. The department head serves as a major adviser on health policy, oversees Medicare and Medicaid, and is the head of many agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.
Becerra is an unusual pick to lead HHS, as he currently serves as the Attorney General of California and previously chaired the House Democratic Caucus. Becerra is pro-abortion rights, and has thus been criticized by a number of right-wing anti-abortion organizations.
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: Marcia Fudge
To chair the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Biden has chosen Rep. Marcia Fudge, a Democrat from Ohio. She is Black, and will, therefore, be the first person of color to serve as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. HUD is responsible for providing affordable housing programs and regulates housing and enforces laws against discrimination. She will be in charge of fixing a housing crisis exacerbated by a looming eviction crisis caused by COVID-19 and a massive backlog by many tenants, and fair and equitable housing will also be a major goal of HUD under Biden.
Secretary of Transportation: Pete Buttigieg
At 38, Pete Buttigieg would bring much-needed youth to the Biden Cabinet. The first-ever openly gay Cabinet nominee in U.S. history and a rising star in the Democratic Party who even ran for the nomination in 2020, Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Ind., will be serving as the Secretary of Transportation in the Biden administration.
The department oversees America’s roads, air services, and railroads, and he will be partially tasked with having to relieve transit agencies sapped dry of funding by the COVID-19 pandemic and promoting mass transit projects in America.
Secretary of Energy: Jennifer Granholm
Jennifer Granholm, a former governor and attorney general of Michigan, has been chosen by Biden to be the second woman to lead the Department of Energy. She will be a key figure to Biden’s environmental policies, being the head of the department that oversees America’s energy production, conservation, nuclear weapons, radioactive waste disposal, and more.
Her support of the auto industry will be important, as Biden seeks to speed the rollout of electric vehicles and also helps the Biden administration strengthen its appeal to blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt. The Energy Department under Granholm will be a drastic change from the Energy Department in the Trump administration, which actively promoted natural gas exports and fossil fuels.
Secretary of Education: Miguel Cardona
To head the department that oversees America’s schools and education system, Biden has chosen Miguel Cardona, the Connecticut Education Commissioner, to serve as the first Latino Secretary of Education.
An experienced teacher and former principal, Cardona has worked to close the language gap during his time as a teacher. He will likely have an integral role to play with regard to Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s stance on student debt. Democrats have been calling for Biden to cancel student debt and make it cheaper to attend college.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs: Denis McDonough
A former national security adviser and Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough will be in charge of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA is in charge of providing health care, rehabilitation, insurance, and other services to America’s veterans. The VA is also tasked with trying to prevent and end veteran homelessness, a problem all too prevalent in the United States.
Secretary of Homeland Security: Alejandro Mayorkas
Last but not least, we have Alejandro Mayorkas, who will serve as the Secretary of Homeland Security in the Biden administration. He will be the first Latino and immigrant to serve in this position, and he has previously served as a U.S. Attorney in a California district court, directed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and was a deputy secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration.
He will be responsible for implementing Biden’s agenda related to immigration, including the resumption and strengthening of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an Obama-era policy that stops undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children from deportation. He will also be responsible for reversing Trump’s policies which made it more difficult to seek asylum in the U.S. and stopping migrants from waiting a long time. He may also be tasked with reducing immigration wait times and fixing some prevalent issues with America’s immigration system.
Biden has chosen a team of competent professionals to lead the federal government, a stark change from Trump appointees. We will have to wait and see how well this team of professionals can relieve America’s many problems and fix the coronavirus crisis once and for all, and build a more equitable America.
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