Obama Watch: Princetonians in Washington

Michael Froman ’85, deputy national security adviser

Michael Froman ’85, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, joined the Obama administration in early February. He reports to the National Economic Council and the National Security Council, and his responsibilities include acting as a White House liaison at meetings of the G20 economic powers, as well as the G7 and G8. Froman was an advisory board member on the Obama-Biden transition team.

Froman, who attended Harvard Law School with President Barack Obama and was an undergraduate classmate of Michelle Obama ’85, majored in the Woodrow Wilson School and produced a radio news program on WPRB during his college days. After law school, he received a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University.

Froman’s new position marks a return to Washington. He previously worked for the National Economic Council, the National Security Council, and the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration. More recently, he served as a managing director at Citigroup, working with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. In March, when executives in the financial-services industry were under fire about year-end bonuses, Froman vowed that if he were to receive a bonus for last year, he would give his to charity, according to The New York Times.

Adam Frankel '03, right, meeting at the White House with chief speechwriter Jon Favreau and President Barack Obama.

Pete Souza/The White House

Adam Frankel '03, senior presidential speechwriter

Adam Frankel ’03 is senior presidential speechwriter in the White House. He joined the Obama campaign in March 2007 and worked out of Chicago during most of the campaign. Frankel previously assisted Theodore C. Sorensen, a speechwriter and close adviser to President John F. Kennedy, on his memoir,Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History. “He knows me and my style and JFK’s style and his speeches,” Sorensen said in an interview. “It’s surprising the little touches that creep into whatever he writes for Obama.” Frankel also is co-author, with Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., of Taking the Hill: From Philly to Baghdad to the United States Congress.

Frankel majored in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, where he was a columnist for The Daily Princetonian, president of the College Democrats, and founder of the Princeton chapter of the Student Global AIDS Campaign. He spent two summers in college traveling in Africa and Asia, researching government and nonprofit efforts to stem the spread of AIDS and working to build a network of AIDS activists. He received a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He was also deputy project director of the Angola Commission at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Alan B. Krueger, assistant treasury secretary

Alan B. Krueger, professor of economics and public policy, was nominated March 8 by President Barack Obama to serve as assistant treasury secretary for economic policy. Krueger is currently serving as a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. If confirmed by the Senate, Krueger would also hold the title of chief economist in the department. Krueger’s nomination was announced along with those of two other assistant treasury secretaries, David Cohen and Kim Wallace. “With the leadership of these accomplished individuals and our whole economic team, I am absolutely confident that we will turn around this economy and seize this opportunity to secure a more prosperous future,” Obama said.

Krueger has held a joint appointment since 1987 in Princeton’s economics department and the Woodrow Wilson School; if confirmed, he would take a government-service leave from the University. Krueger was chief economist in the labor department under President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 1995. He has published widely on the economics of education, terrorism, labor demand, income distribution, social insurance, labor market regulation, and environmental economics. He is the founding director of Princeton’s Survey Research Center and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and of the Institute for the Study of Labor. Krueger is the author of What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism and Education Matters: A Selection of Essays on Education, and the co-author of Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage and of Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? For six years he was a regular contributor to the “Economic Scene” column in The New York Times.

Lisa Heinzerling '83, the EPA's senior climate counsel

Lisa Heinzerling ’83, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center since 1997, has been named the Environmental Protection Agency’s top attorney on climate-change issues. As the senior policy counsel on climate change, she reports directly to EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson *86. Heinzerling, an authority on environmental and administrative law, was an assistant attorney general in the Environmental Protection Division of the Massachusetts attorney general’s office before joining the Georgetown faculty. She also has taught at the Harvard and Yale law schools. 

In 2007, Heinzerling was the lead author of the winning briefs for the state of Massachusetts in Massachusetts v. EPA, a landmark Supreme Court decision that required the EPA to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from motor vehicles under the 1970 Clean Air Act. She co-authored with Frank Ackerman of Tufts University the 2003 bookPriceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, a critique of cost-benefit analysis. A philosophy major at Princeton, she is married to classmate Robert J. Lechleider ’83; they have two children.

Dallas C. Brown III '78, chief operating officer for national protection and programs, Department of Homeland Security

Dallas C. Brown III ’78 has been named chief operating officer for national protection and programs at the Department of Homeland Security. His responsibilities include oversight of national programs in critical infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, the national communications system, biometrics analysis, risk management and assessment, and  intergovernmental relations. Brown is a former Army colonel who served most recently as director of U.S. Central Command's Joint Interagency Coordination Group at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and forward in the Middle East and Central Asia. Previously, he was director for peacekeeping within OSD Policy at the Pentagon, including deployment to Kuwait and Iraq with the Coalition Provisional Authority during the opening phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom. From 1994 to 1997 he was director for global issues and multilateral affairs on the National Security Council staff at the White House, and subsequently he commanded a tank battalion task force in Germany and Bosnia.

At Princeton, Brown majored in the Woodrow Wilson School, received an Army ROTC scholarship, and was a member of freshman lightweight crew and the 150-pound football team. 

Joshua DuBois *05, director of faith-based and neighborhood partnerships

Joshua DuBois *05 was selected by President Barack Obama as head of the White House’s office for faith-based programs Feb. 5.

DuBois will direct the President’s Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, a group that Obama said “will work on behalf of those organizations that want to work on behalf of our communities.”

In 2008, DuBois served as director of religious affairs for Obama’s presidential campaign. He also has worked as a Pentecostal pastor in Massachusetts. At Princeton, he earned a master’s in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School. 

DuBois was raised in Nashville and graduated cum laude from Boston University. During his time as a graduate student at Princeton, Dubois worked for Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., and Rep. Rush D. Holt, D-N.J., Princeton’s local representative and a former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

Anne-Marie Slaughter '80, director of policy planning, State Department

Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80 has resigned as dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School to become head of policy planning in the State Department. Slaughter will take a public service leave of absence from the faculty, where she is the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs. The policy-planning staff, created in 1947 by George Kennan ’25, functions as an internal think tank for the State Department by taking a “a longer-term, strategic view of global trends,” and Slaughter will report directly to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

President Tilghman said Slaughter’s legacy as dean “is a Woodrow Wilson School that has not just sustained its reputation as an academic powerhouse, but it has become a stronger and more influential school of public policy and international affairs.” The search for a new dean is expected to begin in coming weeks. Serving as interim dean will be Mark Watson, professor of economic and public affairs.

As dean of the Wilson School, Slaughter has recruited leading scholars in the field of international affairs, brought in well-known policymakers for visiting teaching positions, and supported programs encouraging public-service careers, including the Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative. She co-directed the Princeton Project on National Security, a comprehensive series of recommendations for America’s national security over the next century, and led a task force formed by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the best ways to support democratic groups in other countries. Slaughter’s most recent books are The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with our Values in a Dangerous World (2007) andA New World Order (2004). Slaughter majored in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, was a Sachs scholar, and studied at Oxford for two years after graduation. She earned her law degree at Harvard in 1985 and her doctorate in international relations from Oxford in 1992. She is married to Andrew Moravcsik, a professor in Princeton’s politics department and the Woodrow Wilson School, who will remain on the faculty full time; they have two sons. 

Cecilia E. Rouse, Council of Economic Advisers

Cecilia E. Rouse, the Theodore A. Wells ’29 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, has been selected as one of three members of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Rouse’s research and teaching interests are in labor economics, centered on the economics of education. Rouse is also the founding director of Princeton’s Education Research Section, an affiliation of social scientists who study education at all levels, and directs the Industrial Relations Section. She is a senior editor of The Future of Childrenand an editor of the Journal of Labor Economics.  In 1998-99 she served in the White House on the National Economic Council. She received her doctorate in economics from Harvard University. During her confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee Jan. 14, Rouse said that “investments in education and training are critical to any strategy to help jump-start our economy.” Nominated to head the Council of Economic Advisers is Christina Romer, a former assistant professor at Princeton who has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley since 1988. 
 

William J. Lynn III *82, deputy defense secretary

William J. Lynn III *82, a top executive at Raytheon Co. and a former Pentagon official, was named deputy defense secretary Jan. 8 by President-elect Barack Obama. If confirmed, he would fill the No. 2 job at the Defense Department.  Lynn is the senior vice president of government operations and strategy at Raytheon, where until July he was registered to lobby before Congress and the administration. “We are aware that Mr. Lynn lobbied for Raytheon and are working with Mr. Lynn to craft a role for him that is consistent with the president-elect’s high standards while balancing the need to fill this critical national-security position,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama. He said Lynn was “highly recommended from experts across the political spectrum.” 

From 1993 to 1997, Lynn oversaw strategic planning at the Pentagon, and from 1997 until 2001 he was undersecretary of defense and chief financial officer of the department. Before 1993, Lynn was on the staff of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., as liaison to the Senate Armed Services Committee. He also was a senior fellow at the National Defense University and worked on the professional staff of the Institute for Defense Analyses. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Lynn has a master’s in public affairs from Princeton and a Cornell law degree. 

Elena Kagan '81, solicitor general

Elena Kagan ’81, dean of Harvard Law School, was nominated Jan. 5 by President-elect Barack Obama to serve as solicitor general – the Justice Department official who argues cases on behalf of the administration before the Supreme Court. If confirmed by the Seante, Kagan would become the first woman to serve fulltime as solicitor general. Like Obama, Kagan attended Harvard Law School and joined the University of Chicago Law School faculty, and she spent a year clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.  From 1995 to 1999, Kagan served in the Clinton White House, first as associate counsel to the president and then as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy and deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council. 

In 1999 Kagan was nominated to the D.C. Circuit Court, but the nomination stalled through the end of Clinton’s term. She came to Harvard Law School as a visiting professor in 1999 and became professor of law in 2001 before she was named the first female dean of the law school in 2003. She has won high marks for reducing factionalism among faculty ranks and for her fundraising prowess. 

Kagan said in a statement that if confirmed by the Senate, she would resign the deanship and take a leave of absence from the law school faculty. “I am honored and grateful, awestruck and excited, to be asked to contribute to this most important endeavor,” she said. Obama announced three other Justice Department nominees along with Kagan, saying that the four “bring the integrity, depth of experience, and tenacity that the Department of Justice demands in these uncertain times.”
 

Eric S. Lander '78, co-chairman, Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

Eric S. Lander ’78, a key figure in the mapping of the human genome, was named co-chairman of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Dec. 20 by President-elect Barack Obama. Lander is founder and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, launched in 2004 with the goal of using genomics to transform medicine. Obama said Lander “will be a powerful voice in my administration as we seek to find the causes and cures of our most devastating diseases.” 

A mathematics major at Princeton, Lander was a Pyne Prize winner, Rhodes Scholar, and class valedictorian. After earning his doctorate at Oxford University, he joined the faculty at Harvard Business School. Applying his interest in mathematics to the life sciences, he taught himself biology and molecular biology, and won a 1987 MacArthur Fellowship. He received Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson award in 1998. “I can’t think of a time when the problems and challenges facing the country – environment and energy, health care, education – had more to do with science and technology than they do today,” Lander told The Boston Globe. Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and former director of the National Institutes of Health, will also serve as co-chairman of the commission. 

Lander is scheduled to speak on “Reading the Human Genome” at Princeton Feb. 9 as part of the Lewis-Sigler Institute Seminar Series.

Lisa P. Jackson *86, EPA administrator

Lisa P. Jackson *86, chief of staff of N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine and formerly head of the state’s environmental protection agency, is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. In making the announcement Dec. 15, Obama said Jackson “has spent a lifetime in public service at the local, state, and federal level” and that she has helped make New Jersey a leader in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and developing new sources of energy. Jackson, who received a master’s degree in chemical engineering from Princeton, said that “as an environmentalist, as a public servant, as a native New Orleanian, as a New Jerseyan, and, most importantly, as a mother, there is simply no higher calling for me than to lead this vital agency at this vital time.”

Jackson worked for the EPA for 16 years before joining New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection in 2002. While she has had her critics as DEP commissioner, environmental groups generally gave her high marks and welcomed the news of her nomination. In mid-November she became part of the Obama transition team for energy and the environment. If confirmed, she would become the first African-American administrator of the EPA and the third Princeton graduate to hold the office.

Paul A. Volcker ’49, chairman of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board

On Nov. 26, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker ’49 was named chairman of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a group established by President-elect Barack Obama to provide nonpartisan analysis and advice. The board was created for a two-year term, according to a press release from the transition team, but may keep working beyond two years if the president deems a continuation necessary.

Volcker headed the Fed from 1979-87 and brought the inflation of the 1970s under control by tightening the growth of the money supply. His two terms also spanned a period of recession and high unemployment. After leaving the Fed, Volcker taught at Princeton for seven years. In 2004-05, he led the independent investigation into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme, and more recently, he served as an economic adviser to Obama during the presidential campaign. Volcker, 81, majored in the School of Public and International Affairs (now the Woodrow Wilson School) and graduated summa cum laude. He pursued post-graduate studies at Harvard University and the London School of Economics.

Peter R. Orszag ’91, director of the Office of Management and Budget

Peter R. Orszag ’91 was announced Nov. 24 as President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to become director of the Office of Management and Budget, a Cabinet-level position. Orszag has been director of the Congressional Budget Office since January 2007, and since then the agency has expanded its focus on health care and climate change. He has written a blog (http://cboblog.cbo.gov/) as CBO director for nearly a year. Before taking the CBO position, Orszag was a senior fellow for economic studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution, where he served as director of the Hamilton Project and the Retirement Security Project. He previously worked as an economic adviser to President Bill Clinton and to the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration. Orszag, a marathon-runner who turns 40 on Dec. 16, graduated summa cum laude in economics from Princeton. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics, which he attended as a Marshall scholar.

Chris Lu ’88, Cabinet secretary

Chris Lu ’88 will serve as Cabinet secretary, it was announced Nov. 19. Lu, a Harvard Law classmate of Obama, is the executive director of the Obama-Biden transition project, where he manages the day-to-day operations of the transition. He was legislative director and acting chief of staff in Obama’s Senate office, as well as a policy adviser during the presidential campaign. From 1997 to 2005, he was deputy chief counsel to Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., on the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee (now the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee). He regularly contributes Class Notes to PAW as the Class of 1988’s class secretary. At Princeton, Lu majored in the Woodrow Wilson School; his thesis focused on press coverage of presidential primaries.

Lisa Brown ’82 , staff secretary

Lisa Brown ’82 will become White House staff secretary, a position responsible for reviewing official documents before the president signs them, according to a Nov. 19 announcement. Brown, the executive director of the Washington-based American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, has been serving the transition team as co-director of agency review. She previously worked at the civil-rights law firm Relman & Dane, formerly Relman & Associates, served as counsel to Vice President Al Gore, worked as an attorney adviser in the Department of Justice, and was a partner at the law firm Shea & Gardner. After graduating magna cum laude from Princeton with a degree in politics, she received her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School.