Biden chooses his inner circle
A deeper look at some of his top advisors
Joe Biden is making his picks for positions on his Cabinet and as top advisors. Many have served in previous administrations, and have participated in Miller Center projects and events. Here's a look back at what they had to say.
Jared Bernstein
Council of Economic Advisors
Bernstein wrote an essay for the Miller Center's First Year Project, covering why the next president cannot pretend that we can meet fiscal challenges without paying for them.
"A new president’s first budget will and should reflect the vision on which he or she campaigned," he wrote in 2016. "It must also reflect the nation’s fiscal and economic needs, both cyclical and structural."
Ashley Deeks
Associate Counsel and Deputy Legal Advisor to the National Security Council
A Miller Center senior fellow until securing a position with the National Security Council under President Biden in January 2021, Ashley Deeks was also a professor at UVA School of Law and a senior fellow at the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare at West Point. She participated in the important Miller Center conference on "The Presidency and Endless War" in October 2020. Watch the discussion (Deeks joins at 2:17:30):
John Kerry
Special Presidential Envoy for Climate
In 2010, Kerry sat down with the Miller Center's elite oral history team to record an interview as part of the Edward M. Kennedy Histories—about the other senator from Massachusetts.
In it, Kerry spoke about his pre-Senate interactions with Kennedy, whom he met as an 18-year-old campaign volunteer.
When asked if that was when he knew he wanted to go into politics, he answered, "I knew I was interested in public life. I didn't know that I wanted to run for office, but I knew that I was interested in issues and interested in the process.
"I’d come out of school, where I’d given a speech on the Revolution and the South, and the battle of segregation and the transformation of America," he added. "That was one of the early things that President [John F.] Kennedy had to deal with and I was just about to go to college, and we were all beginning to feel the earliest moments of the 1960s transformation that was taking place."
Alejandro Mayorkas
Secretary of Homeland Security
Mayorkas joined the Miller Center for a conversation about U.S. Immigration policy in 2011, when he was director of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service, overseeing the administration of the world’s largest immigration agency.
A few years later, in 2014, Mayorkas once again joined with the Miller Center to work on "The Way Forward on Immigration: A Memo to the President and the Congress.” This report was based on the Miller Center’s multi-year Galbraith Initiative on Immigration, which assembled leading scholars, policymakers, and practitioners from across the country, representing different points of view, to address America’s broken immigration system.
Jen Psaki
White House Press Secretary
Psaki joined a Miller Center–Brookings joint event covering the prospects of Trump's domestic agenda for 2017. One key theme was the need to remain focused and get the tough items—like the budget—done early. In one notable exchange, the group worried that campaign promises and ongoing rhetoric might offer up more than can realistically be achieved domestically in the first year. Watch the full conversation:
Susan Rice
White House Domestic Policy Council
'The state of democracy globally, to be charitable, is anemic," Rice told a packed house in May 2019, gathered at UVA for the Presidential Ideas Festival: Democracy in Dialogue. "In 1990 there were roughly five democracies in Africa. By the end of the decade, there were roughly 25. ... Now what we see is at least a stagnation."
Rice was joined by UVA's Democracy Initiative Co-Director Melody Barnes, who served in the Obama administration in the same White House Domestic Policy Council role that Rice will take for President-elect Biden. Also on the dais were Peter Wehner, who was director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives in the George W. Bush administration, and Risa Goluboff, dean of the UVA School of Law and Miller Center faculty senior fellow.
Watch their full conversation on the state of democracy.