Department of Commerce, Under Secretary for Economic Affairs

Department/Agency: Department of Commerce

Position:

Under Secretary for Economic Affairs

Executive Schedule: Executive Level III - Presidential Appointment with Senate Confirmation

Major Responsibilities:

Oversee U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis
Provide business, economic and trade information for government, businesses
Advise the Secretary and Deputy Secretary
Represent Commerce to the Council of Economic Advisers

Key Competencies and Preferred Qualifications:

Ph.D. in economics
Management experience in public or private sector

Insight:

The Under Secretary for Economic Affairs runs the Commerce Department's Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA), which includes the Bureau of the Census, the government's premiere statistics shop, as well as the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which determines the Gross Domestic Product and other important financial yardsticks. ESA provides the government and the private sector up to date information on business, trade and economic performance, and produces voluminous reports exploring the lives and livelihoods of Americans. Its work reveals much about everyday life in America, from how many people live in each city, state and hamlet to how many have health insurance to how many completed high school and college. In the agency's own words, "ESA is the bureau within the U.S. Department of Commerce where economic and social changes are chronicled, understood, and explained."

The biggest task facing the next under secretary for economic affairs will be to complete preparations for and carry out a successful Census on April 10, 2010 - a decennial exercise prescribed by Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution. The Census often is called the government's single biggest undertaking in peacetime. With the economy now in recession, President-elect Barack Obama and his economic team will be looking to the ESA for early signs of a turnaround and for economic analyses to help chart the steadiest course forward. The work of ESA economists and analysts also will be important as the new president seeks to deliver on a campaign promise to improve health care and find ways to cover the 45 million uninsured.

This Census - the 23^rd in the nation's history - will be carried out with the help of a temporary army of almost 500,000 who will supplement the Census Bureau's regular staff, which expands threefold to nearly 18,000 to get the job done. The first Census in 1790 was conducted by federal marshals on horseback; they counted almost 4 million people. Census 2000 found 281 million, and demographers expect the next count to find more than 310 million. The U.S. population topped 300 million in October 2006.

The president-elect and the next under secretary will have little time to spare in selecting a new Census director. The incumbent, Steve Murdock, a demographer and academic from Texas, only became director in January 2008. The bureau also lost its No. 2 official to retirement in 2008. Last April outgoing Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez told Congress he was aborting plans to equip all half-million field workers with hand-held computers for canvassing and would rely instead on "the tried and true paper system." Many Census workers will have handheld Global Positioning Systems to verify people's street addresses. But the more ambitious plan for a paperless canvass fell victim to cost overruns and the Census Bureau's inability to tell a software vendor exactly what they wanted. Census costs, which already had ballooned in current dollars from $4 billion in 1980 to $8 billion in 2000, are expected to exceed $12 billion despite a decision only to mail out short form surveys. In prior censuses, one house in six got a much longer survey. Canvassers go out and knock on doors only if residents fail to mail back the survey, as millions do. "To ensure the success of our democracy, we must have an accurate head count. We need to count people once and only once, and in the right place," Under Secretary Cynthia A. Glassman said in a recent speech.

As large and important as the Census is - it determines how many seats each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives and also is used to allocate billions of dollars in grants to states and localities -- the Census is just one of the ways the Bureau tracks the growing U.S. population. "The Census Bureau collects vast amounts of income, expenditure, and investment data from households, firms, and governments, as well as extensive demographic data," Glassman noted in another talk. It conducts a separate business census every five years and its ongoing monthly, quarterly and annual surveys of individuals and businesses routinely make front-page news. The Bureau of Economic Analysis pulls together its own data as well as statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Internal Revenue Service, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other sources to calculate the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Glassman, a Ph.D. economist, addressing an OECD forum in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2007, said, "the increasing cost of health care is the No. 1 long-term budget issue confronting the U.S. government." Health care spending absorbs 16 percent of GDP - far more than any other nation spends - but Glassman said, "Preliminary research indicates that our measures of health care inflation are likely overstated." If that is so, "we could be looking at an overstatement of overall inflation .... Getting the best evidence we can in this area is critical not only for health care policy, but also for fiscal and monetary policy."

While statistics and statisticians often are stereotyped as a dry activity and profession, the Economics and Statistics Administration looks deeply into nearly every significant aspect of Americans' lives. Another example: a 2007 report detailing the slow economic recovery in the Gulf Coast two years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Originally named the Office of Economic Affairs, ESA was created in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy to coordinate the formation of U.S. economic policy.

Key Relationships – Within the Government:

Secretary and Deputy Secretary
Director, Census Bureau
Director, Bureau of Economic Analysis
Director, Research, Analysis and Statistics, Internal Revenue Service, Treasury Department
Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor
Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, Treasury Department
Assistant Secretary of Tax Policy, Treasury Department
Administrator, National Center for Health Statistics
Director, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice
Commissioner, National Center for Education Statistics
Federal Reserve Board
White House Council of Economic Advisers

Key Relationships – Outside the Government:

President, American Economics Association
President, Chamber of Commerce of the United States
President, AFL-CIO

Nomination Referred to:

Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation

Current Position Profile:
1. Rebecca M. "Becky" Blank, Ph.D. (Confirmed: May 21, 2009). Former Senior Fellow, Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution; Former Vice President, American Economic Association; Professor of Public Policy, Universitiy of Michigan.

Recent Position Profiles:

2. Cynthia A. Glassman, Ph.D. (2006-2009). Former Securities and Exchange Commission member. Former economist for Federal Reserve Board of Governors and Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

3. Kathleen B. Cooper, Ph.D. (2001-2005). Chief economist for Exxon Mobil Corp. Executive vice president and chief economist of Security Pacific National Bank. Chief Economist of United Banks of Colorado.

4. Robert Shapiro, Ph.D. (1997-2001). Managing Director and Founding Partner of Sonecon LLC. Co-Founder and vice president of Progressive Policy Institute. Legislative Director and economic counsel for Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-NY). Associate Editor, U.S. News & World Report.

5. Everett M. Ehrlich, Ph.D. (1993-1997). President, ESC Company, Senior Vice President and Director of Research for Committee for Economic Development, Vice President for Economic and Financial Planning and then for Strategic Planning at Unisys Corporation, Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office.