Biden nominates Indian-American security expert to top Pentagon post

CHENNAI: “Americans of Indian descent are taking over the country,” said the US President Joe Biden during a virtual interaction with NASA scientists. What he said casually is strolling to be true, with more than 50 Indian Americans have been appointed for key leadership roles in less than a year of Biden-Harris administration. Several Indian Americans hit headlines for making it big in various niches. Indeed, the Indian immigrants make the highly-educated and highest-earning ethnic community in America.

Joe Biden has nominated security expert Radha Iyengar Plumb for the top Pentagon position, to the post of Deputy under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment on Wednesday, making Ms. Plumb the latest Indian-American to be named for a key-position. She is currently serving as the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Wednesday.

Prior to her appointment as Chief of Staff, Ms Plumb was the Director of Research and Insights for Trust and Safety at Google, leading their cross-functional teams on business analytics, data science and technical research. She has also previously served as the Global Head of Policy Analysis at Facebook, where she focused on high-risk safety and critical international security issues.

Radha Iyengar Plumb, skilled in policy research and econometrics, was also a senior economist at RAND Corporation where she focused on improving the measurement and evaluation of readiness and security efforts across the Department of Defense. She has also held a number of senior staff positions on national security issues at the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the White House National Security Council.

At the outset of her career, Plumb was an assistant professor at the London School of Economics and did her postdoctoral work at Harvard. She received her PhD. and MS in Economics from Princeton University and holds a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

US President Joe Biden is set to nominate Indian-American career diplomat Gautam Rana as the new US Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Slovakia, the White House said in a statement last month. In March, President Biden nominated two Indian-Americans as US envoys.

He nominated diplomat Puneet Talwar as the country's ambassador to Morocco and political activist Shefali Razdan Duggal as his envoy to the Netherlands. He also nominated Indian-American Diplomat Rachana Sachdeva Korhonen as his envoy to Mali, the third such nomination of an Indian-American in over a month.