The Senate confirmed two key members of President Joe Biden’s economic team Tuesday, ushering in Gina Raimondo, the governor of Rhode Island and a former venture capitalist, as the next secretary of commerce, and Cecilia Rouse, a Princeton University economist, as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Rouse will become the first Black chair of the economic council in its 75-year history. She was approved by a vote of 95-4.
Raimondo was confirmed 84-15. A moderate Democrat with a background in the financial industry, Raimondo is expected to leverage her private and public sector experience to oversee a sprawling bureaucracy that is charged with both promoting and regulating US business.
Under Raimondo, the Commerce Department is likely to play a crucial role in several of Biden’s policy efforts, including spurring the US economy, building out rural broadband and other infrastructure, and leading America’s technology competition with China. The department also carries out the census and oversees US fisheries, weather monitoring, telecommunications standards and economic data gathering, among other activities.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said that she thought Raimondo’s private sector experience would help her facilitate new investments and create jobs and that she was “counting on Gov. Raimondo to help us with our export economy.”
Rouse is the dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a former member of the council under President Barack Obama. Her academic research has focused on education, discrimination and the forces that hold some people back in the US economy.
She will assume her post amid an economic and public health crisis from the coronavirus pandemic, and in the waning days of congressional debate on a $1.9 trillion economic aid package that Biden has made his first major legislative priority.
Rouse has made clear that she sees a larger set of priorities as council chair: overhauling the inner workings of the federal government to promote racial and gender equity in the economy.
“As deeply distressing as this pandemic and economic fallout have been,” she said in her hearing, “it is also an opportunity to rebuild the economy better than it was before — making it work for everyone by increasing the availability of fulfilling jobs and leaving no one vulnerable to falling through the cracks.”