WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama filled in more pieces of his second term leadership team Monday, nominating a trio of new advisers to lead the Energy Department, Environmental Protection Agency and budget office.
Two of Obama’s new nominees will focus on a second term priority: tackling the threat of climate change. To head that effort, Obama promoted current EPA official Gina McCarthy to lead the agency and MIT scientist Ernest Moniz to run the Energy Department.
“They’re going to be making sure we’re investing in American energy, that we’re doing everything we can to combat the threat of climate change, that we’re going to be creating jobs and economic opportunity,” Obama said of McCarthy and Moniz. “They are going to be a great team.”
The president also tapped Wal-Mart’s Sylvia Mathews Burwell as his next budget chief.
Speaking at a White House ceremony, Obama said Burwell not only knows how “to make the numbers add up” but to ignite middle class economic growth. He said Burwell and her team would face particular challenges as the so-called sequester cuts take hold, but said he was confident they would “do everything in their power to blunt the impact of these cuts on businesses and middle class families.”
Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.