Browsing: Transition

The White House announced six more political appointees Tuesday, including three for the Veterans Affairs Department. Roger Baker, nominee for assistant secretary for information and technology, Veterans Affairs. Baker is the former president and chief executive office of Dataline, a technology company in Norfolk, Va. He also is a former chief information officer of the Commerce Department and served on President Barack Obama’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications policy group during his 2008 presidential campaign. William Gunn, nominee for general counsel, VA. He represents military members and veterans in his Northern Virginia law practice. He retired in 2005 from the Air…

Jon Cannon, President Barack Obama’s nominee for deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, withdrew his name from consideration Wednesday afternoon. And in case you’re wondering, it’s not over unpaid taxes, an issue which has befallen a handful of Obama’s other nominees. Cannon, an environmental law professor at the University of Virginia, said he withdrew because he once served on the board of a nonprofit group currently under investigation. It has come to my attention that America’s Clean Water Foundation, where I once served on the board of directors, has become the subject of scrutiny. While my service on the…

NYU professor Paul Light has a good op-ed in today’s New York Times on the interminable Senate confirmation process and how that leads to the growth of unconfirmed “czar” positions: The Senate has done virtually nothing, for example, to address the glacial pace of confirmations that often leads presidents to expand the White House staff as well as the number of appointees who serve without Senate approval. Although he has submitted the names of nominees to the Senate relatively quickly, President Obama will be lucky if the last of his nearly 500 full-time cabinet and subcabinet officers are confirmed by…

We reported back in January that the president planned to nominate Harvard professor Cass Sunstein to head OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. So where’s his nomination? The White House’s nominations list doesn’t mention Sunstein. (In fact, if you search for him on the White House Web site, you won’t get any results.) The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee tells me it hasn’t heard a word about Sunstein’s nomination. And the White House hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

Carl Malamud is running for federal office. For head of the Government Printing Office, to be precise. But there’s no election. No matter, he’s running anyway. A week and a half ago, Malamud launched a virtual-roots campaign and Web site – yeswescan.org – in a bid to be appointed by President Barack Obama as the Public Printer of the United States. GPO may seem like a sleepy government outpost to some, but not to Malamud. For him, it would the opportunity of a lifetime. As founder of the California-based nonprofit group Public.Resource.org, he’s spent his career ushering years worth of…

Television personality and neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta has pulled his name from consideration for surgeon general, according to a statement by CNN. Gupta appears frequently on CNN as a commentator on medical and health issues. CNN U.S. President Jon Klein said Gupta made his decision to spend more time on his medical career and CNN career, according to a statement on CNN’s Web site. Though a distinguished Atlanta neurosurgeon and professor, Gupta is best known to most Americans as a prolific television commentator. However, he served as an adviser to the Clinton White House, helping craft health care speeches and policy…

Just finished a conference call with Vivek Kundra, the president’s pick for chief information officer. A few highlights. First, he promised to embrace cloud computing — which uses networked software distributed across remote servers, not on individual desktops — whenever it’s permissible under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and other security regulations. Cloud computing has been hugely successful in the private sector (Facebook and Gmail, for example, use a “cloud” model) but government has yet to really embrace it. I reject the view that the public sector has to lag behind the private sector. Kundra also promised to…

John Berry, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoological Park, has officially been nominated to head the Office of Personnel Management. There’s been speculation about his appointment since January, but until now it’s been just that – speculation. Update, 4:33 p.m.: Positive reactions so far from federal employee unions. Here’s one from the American Federation of Government Employees.

President Barack Obama today nominated former Washington Gov. Gary Locke as Commerce secretary. Obama said he’s grateful that the two-term governor, the nation’s first of Chinese descent, has “agreed to leave one Washington for another.” He said the Commerce Department will play a vital role in helping carry out the administration’s economic recovery policies. Gary will be a trusted voice in my cabinet, a tireless advocate for our economic competitiveness, and an influential ambassador for American industry who will help us do everything we can – especially now – to promote it around the world. Of course, Locke wasn’t Obama’s first…

The White House today announced seven nominees for deputy and assistant secretaries and administrators. Here it goes: Kathleen Merrigan is Obama’s nominee for deputy secretary of the Agriculture Department. She is currently the director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment masters and doctorate program at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston. Jon Cannon was nominated to be the deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. He is currently the director of the Environmental and Land Use Law Program at the University of Virginia. He previously worked at the EPA during the Reagan, Bush…

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