Senate confirms Yellen as treasury secretary
Beyond facing the immediate coronavirus crisis, Yellen will also play a critical role in Biden’s efforts to reduce income inequality and approve an economic recovery package focused on creating manufacturing and clean energy jobs that is expected to be introduced next month.
WASHINGTON — Janet Yellen was confirmed as the first female treasury secretary in American history by the U.S. Senate on Monday evening.
Yellen’s confirmation process garnered little controversy as the former Federal Reserve chairwoman has long-standing ties to Senate policymakers and extensive economic and government credentials. The final vote was 84-15, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell,
R-Ky., among those supporting Yellen. The Senate Finance Committee voted unanimously last week to send Yellen’s confirmation to the full Senate, with several Senate Republicans on the committee praising her qualifications for the position.
Yellen, 74, spent years as a professor before entering politics as head of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in the late 1990s. She chaired the Fed from 2014 to 2018, playing a key role in the recovery from the recession of 2007-09. President Donald Trump broke with tradition when he opted not to reappoint her in 2017, instead selecting Jerome Powell to lead the central bank.
The Brooklyn-born treasury secretary will try to stabilize an American economy facing its worst crisis in decades. Yellen’s most immediate task will be shepherding President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief package through Congress amid pushback from Republicans and even some centrist Democrats. She will also face a daunting international portfolio that stretches from sanctions on foreign countries to America’s trade agreements.
Beyond facing the immediate coronavirus crisis, Yellen will also play a critical role in Biden’s efforts to reduce income inequality and approve an economic recovery package focused on creating manufacturing and clean energy jobs that is expected to be introduced next month.
“We are living in a K-shaped economy, one where wealth built upon wealth, while working families fell farther and farther behind,” Yellen said during her confirmation hearing last week. “We have to rebuild our economy so that it creates more prosperity, for more people, and ensures that American workers can compete in an increasingly competitive global economy.”
Yellen replaces Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the Wall Street financier who was one of Trump’s closest aides.
McConnell voted to confirm Yellen but criticized Senate Democrats for their delay in confirming Trump’s treasury secretary four years ago.
“When the American people elect a president, and when that president selects qualified and mainstream people for key posts, the whole nation deserves for them to be able to assemble their team,” McConnell said Monday on the Senate floor.
Yellen’s confirmation as the first female treasury secretary follows a career of firsts. In 1971, Yellen was the only woman in her class to earn an economics doctorate from Yale University. She was also the only female economics professor for part of her time teaching at Harvard University.
That record has inspired generations of female economists in Washington and within the economics profession itself. Now, as the coronavirus crisis disproportionately pulls women from the workforce, economists say Yellen’s credentials, and the symbolism of her confirmation, are a timely match for the moment.
“One of the deficiencies we’ve seen is when you have homogeneity among a group of policymakers” said Kathryn Judge, an expert on financial regulation at Columbia Law School. “There are certain challenges they’ll be less inclined to see, and therefore less inclined to address.”