Danielle Gray is the most powerful staffer you may never have heard of. Gray, 35, is President Obama’s cabinet secretary, the liaison between the White House and the cabinet. Far more than a high-level traffic cop, she is a policy expert, a legal troubleshooter, and a practitioner of shuttle diplomacy between White House aides and agency officials who regularly butt heads.
President Obama wanted a more inclusive process with his cabinet during his second term, and in January 2013 he tapped Gray—who had held a number of policy and legal positions in the White House—to help facilitate the process. President Obama, aides note, was impressed with Gray’s good judgment as well as her direct and drama-free demeanor.
Other cabinet members view her as an honest broker when it comes to policy. Still, that doesn’t mean she lacks political convictions. Friends and colleagues say an overriding concern for Gray is reducing economic inequalities and identifying polices to help lift the poor into the middle class.
Gray has a résumé that in many ways seems tailored for her job. Ms. Gray received her bachelor’s degree in Economics and Public Policy from Duke University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She clerked for Judge Merrick Garland, who sits on the federal appeals court in Washington. (She was recommended for the clerkship by her Harvard Law professor, now Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan.) She went on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer before joining a major New York law firm.
Gray worked on Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign and later took on a key policy role on his presidential campaign. Showing an unusual facility for the interplay between policy, politics, and law, Gray rose quickly in the Obama White House, first as a lawyer in the counsel’s office and later as deputy director of the National Economic Council.
Lately Gray has been an instrumental player in a number of key policy areas, including the massively complex and s implementation of the Affordable Care Act. She has also played an important role in managing the rollout of Attorney General Eric Holder’s initiative to reform the U.S. criminal-justice system.
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