WASHINGTON – Today, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the following seven individuals to serve in key roles:
- Paloma Adams-Allen, Nominee for Deputy Administrator for Management and Resources, United States Agency for International Development
- Isobel Coleman, Nominee for Deputy Administrator for Policy and Programming, United States Agency for International Development
- Grant Harris, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Industry and Analysis, Department of Commerce
- Neil MacBride, Nominee for General Counsel, Department of the Treasury
- Caral Spangler, Nominee for Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management and Comptroller), Department of Defense
- Julieta Valls Noyes, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees, and Migration, Department of State
- David Weil, Nominee for Wage and Hour Administrator, Department of Labor
Paloma Adams-Allen, Nominee for Deputy Administrator for Management and Resources, United States Agency for International Development
Paloma Adams-Allen joined the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), a US agency supporting community-led development in Latin America and the Caribbean, in April 2017 as president and chief executive officer. Prior to joining the IAF, Adams-Allen was Sr. Director for global private sector partnerships initiatives at the international NGO, Winrock International. Before that, she served as deputy assistant administrator for the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) Bureau. From 2010 to 2014, Adams-Allen served as Senior Adviser, during which she led the LAC Bureau’s public-private partnerships for development practice. She also spent a decade at the Organization of American States (OAS) in several hemispheric development policy, programming, and leadership roles. Early in her career she did short stints at the international law firm Coudert Brothers, and the advocacy organization Caribbean-Central American Action. Adams-Allen, who was born in Jamaica, spent her childhood between rural Jamaica and rural New England in the U.S. She holds a bachelor’s degree in development studies and African American studies from Brown University, a master’s in international affairs from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and a Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University Law Center. An avid runner and gardener, Adams-Allen lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, their puppy, and two awesome daughters.
Isobel Coleman, Nominee for Deputy Administrator for Policy and Programming, United States Agency for International Development
Ambassador Isobel Coleman is a foreign policy and global development expert with more than 25 years of experience working in government, the private sector and non-profits. Most recently, she served on the Biden Transition Team, leading the review of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. From 2014-2017, she was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for Management, Reform and Special Political Affairs. During that time, she represented the United States in the UN General Assembly on budgetary matters and in the UN Security Council on Africa and peacekeeping issues. From 2018-2020, she was the Chief Operating Officer of GiveDirectly, an international non-profit tackling poverty by providing unconditional cash transfers to the extreme poor.
Previously, Dr. Coleman spent more than a decade as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations where she directed CFR’s Women and Foreign Policy program and wrote extensively about global development and the advantages of women’s empowerment. Her writings have appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is the author and co-author of numerous books including Pathways to Freedom: Political and Economic Lessons from Democratic Transitions (Council on Foreign Relations, 2013), and Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East (Random House, 2010). She graduated from Princeton University and earned MPhil and DPhil degrees in International Relations from Oxford University, which she attended on a Marshall Scholarship. She started her career at McKinsey & Co. in New York, becoming a partner in the firm’s financial institutions group.
Grant Harris, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Industry and Analysis, Department of Commerce
Grant T. Harris is CEO of Connect Frontier LLC, a consulting firm that advises companies on doing business in emerging and frontier markets globally. Harris teaches on strategy and political risk in emerging markets as an Adjunct Professor of Global Management at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and a Lecturer at Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. From 2011-2015, Harris served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the White House. In this role, he conceived of the historic U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, which generated $37 billion in commitments to support trade, investment, and development across Africa. Harris also initiated President Obama’s Doing Business in Africa Campaign and launched the President’s Young African Leaders Initiative. Harris was later appointed by President Obama to serve as a Member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
Previously, Harris served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. Earlier, Harris was an attorney at the global law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, where he focused on cross-border transactions in Latin America. Harris also served in the African Affairs Directorate at the White House under President Bill Clinton and in the U.S. Mission to the United Nations under Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Harris holds a law degree from Yale Law School, a Master’s in Public Affairs, with Distinction, from Princeton University, and a B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of California, Berkeley. Harris grew up in California.
Neil MacBride, Nominee for General Counsel, Department of the Treasury
Neil H. MacBride is a currently a litigation partner in the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he serves as head of its Washington, DC office and as co-head of the Firm’s Government Investigations Practice. Before entering private practice, Mr. MacBride spent extensive time as a government official on law enforcement, national security, and financial enforcement matters. He served in the Obama-Biden Administration, first as an Associate Deputy Attorney General for criminal enforcement in the U.S. Department of Justice and then as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia overseeing all criminal enforcement and civil litigation on behalf of the United States. Mr. MacBride earlier served as Chief Counsel to then-Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on the Senate Judiciary Committee and as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Mr. MacBride also served on the Biden-Harris and the Obama-Biden Transition Teams. Earlier in his career, Mr. MacBride served as General Counsel to the Business Software Alliance and practiced law at the Washington, DC law firm of Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand. He began his public service career clerking for the Honorable Henry C. Morgan, Jr. in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
A native of Oneonta, New York, MacBride graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law and Houghton College. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife Christina Jackson MacBride and their three children.
Caral Spangler, Nominee for Assistant Secretary of the Army, Financial Management and Comptroller, Department of Defense
Caral E. Spangler retired from government service in September 2020 after 39 years with the Department of Defense, serving as a career member of the Senior Executive Service in every Military Service and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller). She began her career as a summer hire in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Financial Management and Comptroller) and advanced during postings with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) and as a Legislative Fellow in the office of Congressman Norman Y. Mineta (D-CA). Promoted to an SES in 1997, she served as the Director of the Investment Directorate within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller); the Director of the Budget Coordination Division in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Financial Management and Comptroller (FM&C); the Deputy for Budget, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force (FM&C); the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (FM&C); and retired as the Assistant Deputy Commandant, Programs and Resources (USMC). In these capacities, she has had oversight of every aspect of programming, budgeting, accounting, finance, financial systems, program and cost analysis in the Department of Defense. She has also served in acting capacities as the Auditor General, Department of the Navy, and as the Assistant Secretary of the Army (FM&C). She was the recipient of a Presidential Meritorious Rank Award in 2015.
While Ms. Spangler was born in Minnesota, she spent her formative years in the Deep South, and graduated from Michigan State University with a Bachelor of Science in Economics. She has a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Ms. Spangler currently lives in Virginia with her husband.
Julieta Valls Noyes, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees, and Migration, Department of State
Julieta Valls Noyes, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, class of Career Minister, is Deputy Director of the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute, and a former U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Croatia. She previously served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs in the Department of State, Deputy Executive Secretary of the Department, and as Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge d’Affaires a.i. at the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See. She also was Deputy Director of the Department’s Operations Center, and Director of the Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Earlier, Noyes served as Deputy Director, Office of Policy Planning and Coordination, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, as Political Section Chief, U.S. Embassy Panama City, and as Political Officer at U.S. Embassy Madrid. Noyes earned a B.A. from Wellesley College, and a Master’s from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. She speaks Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French. Noyes is a first-generation American whose parents entered the United States as refugees.
David Weil, Nominee for Wage and Hour Administrator, Department of Labor
David Weil is Dean and professor at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Prior to joining the Heller School in August 2017, he served as Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division at the United States Department of Labor under President Obama from 2014 to 2017. Weil is an internationally recognized expert in employment and labor market policy along with regulation, transparency policy, and the impacts of industry restructuring on employment, work, and business performance.
Dean Weil has advised government agencies at the state and federal levels as well as international organizations on employment, labor, and workplace policies. He co-founded the Transparency Policy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government that examines how information disclosure can be used to improve private and public decisions. He is the author of more than 125 articles and five books including The Fissured Workplace. He has received numerous awards including the Frances Perkins Intelligence and Courage Award (2019). He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University and Masters and Ph.D. degrees in public policy from Harvard University.
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