“President Barack Obama announced three cabinet-level nominations, choosing Sylvia Mathews Burwell of the Wal-Mart Foundation as director of the Office of Management and Budget, scientist Ernest Moniz as head of the Energy Department, and Gina McCarthy to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, where she’s been an assistant administrator.
“I can promise you that as soon as the Senate gives them the go-ahead, they’re going to hit the ground running and they’re going to help make America a stronger and more prosperous country,” Obama said at the White House today.
Burwell, 47, president of the Wal-Mart Foundation, was deputy OMB director during President Bill Clinton’s administration and also was chief of staff to then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Her tenure included the 1995 budget standoffs between the president and Congress that led to partial government shutdowns.
From 1990 to 1992, she was an associate at McKinsey & Co. She worked for Clinton’s presidential transition team in Little Rock after the 1992 election and later helped Rubin set up the National Economic Council in 1993.
Burwell was named executive vice president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, rising to chief operating officer on Aug. 1, 2002, according to a company press release.
In January 2012 she was named president of the Wal-Mart Foundation, which made $959 million in cash and in-kind contributions worldwide in 2011, according to its website.
She would be the second woman, after Alice Rivlin in the Clinton administration, to head the White House budget office.
