From today's POLITICO:
WHAT'S IN A NAME? Biden's transition team is preparing for the transfer of power even as President Donald Trump refuses to concede. The Biden-Harris transition on Tuesday unveiled its agency review teams, which will lay the groundwork within agencies for the new administration. The list provides a look at what a Biden administration might look like, since many of the same names could end up with jobs in the agencies and will influence who the administration ultimately hires.
The who's who: Patrice Simms, vice president of litigation at Earthjustice, will lead the EPA team. Arun Majumdar , the first head of the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects-Energy arm, will lead the Energy Department team. The Interior Department team will be led by Kevin Washburn, a University of Iowa law professor and member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma who served in the Obama administration as assistant secretary of Indian Affairs. Cecilia Martinez , a veteran environmental justice advocate, will head the Council on Environmental Quality team.
Other notables: The DOE team includes several Obama-era alumni, including Kerry Duggan, a longtime ally of Biden, and Jon Elkind, now at Columbia University, who spent the entire Obama administration at DOE working on international issues. The EPA team includes Matt Fritz, who was chief of staff from 2015 to 2017 and now at firm Latham & Watkins; Cynthia Giles, a former EPA enforcement chief now at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program; Joseph Goffman, a top air adviser who now runs that Harvard program; and Ken Kopocis, a top water official now at American University's law school.
At Interior, there's Bret Birdsong, a University of Nevada law professor who served as Obama's deputy solicitor for Land Resources; Janie Hipp, who led the Agriculture Department's work with tribes under Obama; Kate Kelly , who led outreach work on public lands issues for Obama's Interior Secretary Sally Jewell; Elizabeth Klein, now at New York University's State Impact Center and an associate deputy Interior secretary under Obama; and Shannon Estenoz, a long-time Everglades restoration advocate who headed the Obama administration's work on the River of Grass at Interior and now works at the powerful Everglades Foundation.
What's it show? The transition team argued that its list represented its commitment to the party's left wing, despite some progressives' skepticism of Biden, POLITICO's Alex Thompson, Theodoric Meyer and Megan Cassella report . More than half of the personnel will be women, and at least 40 percent are people of color or people who identify as LGBTQ+, according to the transition.
The names also suggest the Biden administration will look to address climate change and stick to the promise to create "good-paying" jobs in the transition away from fossil fuels. For example, Brad Markell, the executive director of the AFL-CIO's industrial union council, will serve on the DOE team.
Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on the regulatory process, is staffing the Justice Department transition efforts, and longtime State Department climate negotiator Susan Biniaz is joining Biden's team to staff up Foggy Bottom. Center for American Progress' Andy Green is also among the names on the team for the Treasury Department — an inclusion that Evergreen Action's Jamal Raad tweeted "speaks highly" of how the Biden team is putting climate center in financial regulation.
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You can read the full list here.
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