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Biden makes history with pick of Janet Yellen for Treasury secretary as his Cabinet begins to take shape

President-elect Joe Biden began building out his Cabinet on Monday with historic picks for Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security and his point person on intelligence matters.

He chose Janet Yellen to become Treasury secretary, tapping the former chairwoman of the powerful Federal Reserve to guide his efforts to steer the pandemic-hit economy out of crisis. If confirmed, Yellen would be the country's first woman Treasury secretary.

Biden selected Alejandro Mayorkas to become the first immigrant and first Latino to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration policy and border security among its vast portfolio. The department has been one of the most contentious arenas in the federal government as President Donald Trump sought to tighten border security, reduce refugee admissions, increase deportations and build a larger wall along the border with Mexico.

Mayorkas, a Cuban American who arrived with his parents as refugees from Fidel Castro's regime in 1960, has been deputy secretary of the department and headed its citizenship agency.

Janet Yellen, who chaired the Federal Reserve, was picked to lead the Treasury for Joe Biden's presidential administration.
Janet Yellen, who chaired the Federal Reserve, was picked to lead the Treasury for Joe Biden's presidential administration.

Biden had said he sought a diverse Cabinet that "looks like America," and his choices Monday would create one of the most diverse foreign policy staffs in history. He plans to nominate Avril Haines, the former deputy director of the CIA, to serve as the first female director of national intelligence. He plans to nominate Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a Black woman who grew up in the segregated South, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

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Biden chose Antony Blinken as secretary of state, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser and John Kerry as special presidential envoy for climate.

The president-elect was scheduled to introduce his personnel picks Tuesday afternoon in Wilmington, Delaware.

Yellen, 74, grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn where she was made acutely aware of the ravages of unemployment by her father, a doctor, and mother, an elementary school teacher, who had lived through the Great Depression.

During her tenure at the Federal Reserve, Yellen was considered one of the agency’s more “dovish,” or pro-growth policymakers – meaning she was more focused on keeping interest rates low to stimulate growth than on raising rates to ward off a spike in inflation. While she

In 2007, Yellen was the only Fed policymaker to foresee the risks to the economy posed by the worsening housing market and sounded an ominous and prescient warning at a Fed meeting. The housing bust ultimately triggered the Great Recession of 2007-09.

Yellen became the first female chair of the Federal Reserve System in February 2014 during the Obama administration. She served as head of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Bill Clinton. When she earned her doctorate in economics from Yale University in 1971, she was the only woman in her class.

As Fed chair, however, Yellen largely served as a centrist and consensus builder. And as the economy improved after the Great Recession, Yellen spearheaded a series of very gradual rate increases from late 2015 to late 2017, bringing the Fed’s key rate from near zero to a range of 1.25% to 1.5%. Her successor, Jerome Powell, oversaw further rate hikes before slashing the benchmark rate back to zero in March during the early days of the pandemic.

The Treasury Department will play a central role in dealing with the economic impact of the pandemic and with international trade. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has negotiated with Congress over trillions of dollars in coronavirus aid checks for individuals, a loan program for small businesses and federal aid to larger industries. He negotiated Trump's tax cut in 2017 for business and individual income tax.

Negotiations stalled between Congress and the Trump administration over further emergency spending to deal with the pandemic. Democrats sought a $2 trillion package, with another round of direct payments to individuals, while Republicans proposed a $500 billion package focusing on the loan program for small businesses. Biden urged Congress to approve more relief before he takes office Jan. 20.

Yellen argued in August that Congress needed to approve additional relief to spur growth amid the coronavirus pandemic, as she wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times and told National Public Radio. As a member of the Climate Leadership Council, she supported taxing carbon emissions as the most efficient way to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the team Biden announced Monday is “grounded in substance” and will bring a high level of competence and skill to the incoming administration.

The diversity of the advisers, he said, is particularly important, “given how tribalized, how polarized, how dysfunctional American politics is." Linking foreign policy and national security to America’s diversity will help convey that they are not just “elite” arenas, he said.

“This notion that, in fact, there is something that we can still describe in our highly polarized environment as the national interest, and they’re going to work to further it, that’s really important,” Miller said.

Miller, who has worked for a half-dozen former secretaries of state from both parties, said it will also be important for Biden to name a Republican to a high-level position “and not just as a token.”

Mayorkas served as deputy secretary of Homeland Security during President Barack Obama's second term. The post placed him as second-in-command of the department, which has a $60 billion budget and a workforce of 240,000 individuals throughout the world.

President Barack Obama shakes hands with Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after a naturalization ceremony for active-duty service members and civilians on  July 4, 2014, in the East Room of the White House in Washington.
President Barack Obama shakes hands with Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after a naturalization ceremony for active-duty service members and civilians on July 4, 2014, in the East Room of the White House in Washington.

Mayorkas directed the department's Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency charged with operating the largest immigration system in the world. The agency had 18,000 workers and a $3 billion budget.

Mayorkas was confirmed by the Senate as U.S. attorney for the central district of California, where he led a team of 240 assistant U.S. attorneys. He tried numerous criminal and civil cases, including Operation Polarcap, which was then the largest money laundering case in the nation, and the federal tax evasion and money laundering case against famed Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss.

He graduated from the University of California-Berkeley and received his law degree from Loyola Law School.

The director of national intelligence serves as the principal intelligence adviser to the president, ensuring the integration of the federal government's sprawling spy agencies. Haines would be the first woman to head the intelligence community, where the upper echelons have traditionally been dominated by men, if she is confirmed.

Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare, a national security blog, and a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said Haines is “one of the most generally and diversely talented national security practitioners and thinkers I know.”

Biden’s decision to tap a woman for that role is important, he said. “The reason is not that Avril will run things differently from the way a man might. It’s that if someone like Avril can’t get that job, it would really highlight the structural impediments to women in national security.” It signals, he said, “that merit matters.”

Thomas-Greenfield, who grew up under segregation, said the KKK regularly burned crosses on the lawns in her hometown of Baker, Louisiana. Her mother had only an eighth grade education, and her father was forced to leave school in the third grade.

"My mother taught me to lead with the power of kindness and compassion to make the world a better place," Thomas-Greenfield said Monday in a tweet. "I’ve carried that lesson with me throughout my career in Foreign Service – and, if confirmed, will do the same as Ambassador to the United Nations."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden picks Janet Yellen to lead Treasury secretary, Mayorkas for DHS