“As I promised, and I have kept that promise, this is a cabinet that represents what the United States is like. And it takes advantage of the full range of potential that we have in our nation, ”declared President-elect Joe Biden on January 8 when he completed the nominations for his work team.
Democrat Biden’s cabinet will be the most diverse in the country’s history and the first with gender parity.
Twelve of Biden’s 24 nominees to his cabinet are women, and less than half of all appointees are white (four are Latino). All of them will have to be confirmed by the Senate, with a very narrow Democratic majority, to be able to officially fill their positions in the coming weeks.
The last members Biden confirmed for his cabinet were Marty Walsh as Secretary of Labor, Gina Raimondo as Secretary of Commerce and Isabel Guzmán as Director of the Small Business Administration.
The president-elect revealed that he considered nominating Bernie Sanders as Secretary of Labor very seriously, his most important rival in last year’s Democratic primary and one of the most influential progressive figures in the American nation.
However, after seeing the results of the elections in Georgia, which gave the Democrats control of the Senate to the minimum, he decided that he could not risk vacating the Vermont seat that Sanders occupies, and that the Republicans could perhaps win it and take away the reins of the Upper House.
“(Sanders) agreed that we could not risk that,” said Biden and that is why he nominated in his place Walsh, the current mayor of Boston (Massachusetts) and who has the support of the great unions in the country.
In Biden’s latest confirmations, he also announced the first Latina woman in his cabinet, Isabel Guzmán, who joins the other three Hispanics. that the president-elect had already nominated: Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of National Security, Xavier Becerra as Secretary of Health and Miguel Cardona as Secretary of Education.
As for Gina Raimondo, the one chosen by Biden to lead the Commerce Department is the current governor of the state of Rhode Island, and she was one of the candidates that Biden considered for vice president.
Weeks ago, Biden also nominated military veteran Lloyd Austin, 67, to become the first African-American secretary of defense. Austin was the one who led the US troops in their foray into Baghdad in 2003. However, the laws of the country prohibit recently retired members of the military from serving in that position, but Biden would be the second president to break this rule.
His future team also includes faces of the Barack Obama administration (2009-2017). Among those appears Antony Blinken, appointed next Secretary of State, who was already undersecretary of that portfolio, recorded CNN.
They also appear Jake Sullivan, who will occupy the position of National Security Advisor, Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence, who had been the second in command in the CIA, and Janet Yellen, nominated for Secretary of the Treasury, who was head of the Reserve Federal when Biden was vice president.
Biden’s nominations have been well received and have given the signal that he is betting on continuing what was the Obama era. (I)
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