Biden to appoint Nigerian-born Adeyemo deputy treasury secretary —Report

After facing criticism for the lack of diversity in his first round of hires, President-elect Joe Biden plans to announce three people of color for leading positions on his economic team.

According to two people close to Biden’s presidential transition, he is expected to name Cecilia Rouse, an African American economist at Princeton University, to lead the Council of Economic Advisers.

Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, a Nigerian-born attorney and former senior international economic adviser during the Obama administration, will serve as deputy Treasury secretary under former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, who Biden plans to appoint to lead the Treasury Department.

And as director of the Office of Management and Budget, Biden plans to nominate Neera Tanden, president of the liberal thinktank Center for American Progress and a former senior policy adviser to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns. Tanden is Indian American.

Biden also plans to name longtime economic aides Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein to serve on the CEA, according to people familiar with the plans. Both Boushey and Bernstein are white.

The personnel moves were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Biden has also settled on a former senior Obama administration official, Brian Deese, as his top economic adviser in the White House, though the announcement may not come until later this week, after the transition unveils the other, more diverse, picks for his economic team.

People close to Biden’s transition confirmed that Deese, the global head of sustainable investing at investment giant BlackRock, is Biden’s pick for director of the National Economic Council in the White House. His selection is likely to rankle some progressives, who have taken issue with his current job in the financial sector.

Biden has been under rising pressure to select more people of color for senior jobs in his administration. One of his most prominent allies, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), told reporters last week he was unhappy with the number of Black people in Biden’s administration. Clyburn, the highest ranking Black lawmaker in Congress, was widely credited with helping Biden win the South Carolina presidential primary, which revived his struggling campaign.

“From all I hear, Black people have been given fair consideration,” Clyburn said last week. “But there is only one Black woman so far.”

“I want to see where the process leads to, what it produces,” he added. “But so far it’s not good.”

The newly announced team will inherit a struggling US economy and one of the weakest labor markets in the country’s history, with more than 20 million Americans receiving jobless benefits and an unemployment rate near 7 percent. Biden has vowed to pass major economic stimulus and relief programs and provide aid to jobless workers as well as state and local governments, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican-led Senate have been loath to move on major spending packages — leaving Biden with limited tools to address the spiraling crisis.

As the coronavirus surges, the economy is widely expected to hit another downturn as more states and localities issue new shutdown restrictions, throwing more employees out of work. At the same time, a handful of the aid programs Congress passed in the spring are set to expire at the end of the year, including expanded unemployment insurance, a national eviction moratorium and delays for student loan payments.