President Biden Announces Key Nominees

WASHINGTON – Today, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to serve as key leaders in his Administration:

• Courtney Diesel O’Donnell, Nominee for United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, with the rank of Ambassador
• David Huitema, Nominee for Director of the Office of Government Ethics
• Christopher Charles Fonzone, Nominee for Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice
• Erik Woodhouse, Nominee for Head of the Office of Sanctions Coordination, with the rank of Ambassador
• Paul Herdman, Nominee for Member of the Board of Trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation
• Janice Miriam Hellreich, Nominee for Member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• Stuart Alan Levey, Nominee for Member of the Board of Directors of the Millennium Challenge Corporation

Courtney Diesel O’Donnell, Nominee for United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, with the rank of Ambassador
Courtney Diesel O’Donnell currently serves in the Biden-Harris Administration in the Office of the Vice President as a Senior Advisor and the Acting Chief of Staff for Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, working on a range of national and global issues including gender equity and efforts to counter anti-Semitism. She has extensive experience in global partnership development, public affairs, and strategic communications, having served in senior roles in two presidential administrations, nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, national political campaigns, and the private sector. Previously, O’Donnell was the Director of Global Partnerships at Airbnb, where she established programs and alliances to encourage sustainable tourism, support economic empowerment through partnerships, and promote female entrepreneurship around the world. In the Obama-Biden Administration, she served as Communications Director to Dr. Jill Biden, driving forward key initiatives including raising awareness and support for America’s military families at home and abroad and promoting community colleges, and access to higher education. O’Donnell was appointed by President Biden to the President’s Commission on White House Fellows in 2021. She has served on the Advisory Board of the McCourt School of Public Service at Georgetown University and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. O’Donnell received a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and holds a Certificate in Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century from the Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education Program.


David Huitema, Nominee for Director of the Office of Government Ethics
David Huitema has served as both the Assistant Legal Adviser for Ethics and Financial Disclosure as well as the Department of State’s Alternate Designated Agency Ethics Official (ADAEO) since 2016. The Alternate DAEO manages the Department of State’s Ethics Program on a day-to-day basis. Previously, Huitema served as an attorney-adviser advising the Bureau of Human Resources, the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, the Bureau of Energy Resources, and the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. Huitema has also provided legal advice on internet and international telecommunications issues, presidential permits for transboundary pipelines, policy towards Cuba, and Foreign Service personnel matters. He joined the Office of the Legal Adviser in 2006 after several years in private practice and a clerkship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Huitema holds his J.D. from Stanford Law School, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


Christopher Charles Fonzone, Nominee for Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice
Chris Fonzone is the General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), serving as ODNI’s chief legal officer and providing advice and counsel to the Director of National Intelligence and other senior leaders on the full range of issues affecting the Intelligence Community. Prior to the Biden-Harris Administration, Fonzone was a partner in Sidley Austin’s Washington D.C. office. During the Obama-Biden Administration, Fonzone served as Deputy Assistant and Deputy Counsel to President Obama and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council. Previously, he also served as a Member of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the Department of Defense, and also served at the Department of Justice in the Office of Legal Counsel and on the Civil Appellate staff. He also clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Fonzone attended Cornell University and Harvard Law School. 


Erik Woodhouse, Nominee for Head of the Office of Sanctions Coordination, with the rank of Ambassador
Erik Woodhouse currently serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counter Threat Finance and Sanctions in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs at the State Department. In that position, he oversees the Office of Sanctions Policy and Implementation and the Office of Global Sanctions and Threat Finance. Woodhouse has previously served as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for International Affairs at the Treasury Department and as an attorney-adviser with the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department. Apart from his government service, Woodhouse has worked as an attorney, most recently advising clients on compliance with U.S. sanctions and anti-money laundering rules and regulations. Earlier in his career, he was a clerk for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and a researcher at the Program on Energy & Sustainable Development at Stanford University. Raised in Atlanta, Woodhouse received his B.A. from Emory University and J.D. from Stanford Law School. He speaks Spanish.


Paul Herdman, Nominee for Member of the Board of Trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation
Paul Herdman has been President and CEO of Rodel of Delaware since 2004. He is a founding member of the state’s Vision Coalition, one of the nation’s longest standing public-private partnerships working to transform Delaware’s public schools to world-class status. He also serves as Chair of Strategic Planning for Delaware’s Workforce Development Board and has served on a range of local boards, including the Warehouse (a community center designed by and for young people), the Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League, and Delaware’s State Chamber of Commerce. Prior to his current role, Herdman served as a senior manager at New American Schools, and through the Center for Reinventing Public Education, consulted with, and wrote for, the Brookings Institution and RAND. He assisted the Secretary of Education for two governors in Massachusetts during the wholesale redesign of the state’s policies on standards, choice, and finance that contributed to the state’s nationally recognized academic performance. Herdman began his career as a teacher, co-founding an Outward Bound school-within-a-school in New York City which connected hundreds of young people to service and the natural world and informed the creation of Expeditionary Learning, a national model. Internationally, Herdman helped coordinate several benchmarking trips to high performing school systems in Europe, Asia, and North America and recently, spent several months on loan to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), studying how young people in five countries transition to work in this rapidly changing world. Herdman holds a B.A. in Biology from the University of Delaware, as well as his masters and doctoral degrees in Education Administration and Planning from Harvard University. He and his wife, Dana, live in Wilmington and have three grown children.


Janice Miriam Hellreich, Nominee for Member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Janice Miriam Hellreich is Chair of the Executive Compensation Committee and Member of the Corporate Governance Committee and has served on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Board of Directors since March 2019. Originally from Alabama, Hellreich is a Speech and Language Pathologist. She founded the speech and language therapy program for Taipei American School in Taiwan, and later established a private practice in Hawaii, delivering services to culturally diverse adults and children. Hellreich, as President of the Hawaii Speech, Language, & Hearing Association, developed its first professional continuing education program, later becoming Chair of its Legislative Affairs Committee. Active in her community, Hellreich served as President of the Hawaii Medical Association Auxiliary and served on the boards of the American Cancer Society as well as the Hawaii Association of Children and Adults with Learning Disabilities. Helping to train parents with communicatively handicapped children, she developed a home-therapy program for Hawaii’s rural preschool children through the California-Hawaii Elks Major Project. From 2002 to 2009, Hellreich was appointed by the Governor of Hawaii to the Board of Governors of the East-West Center, which is an educational, training, and research institution promoting better relations and understanding among the nations of the United States, Asia, and the Pacific. She was Vice-Chair of the Board of Governors and Chair of the Strategic Planning Committee. Hellreich earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in Speech and Language Pathology at the University of Alabama. She is married to Dr. Philip Hellreich and has a daughter and a granddaughter.

Stuart Alan Levey, Nominee for Member of the Board of Directors of the Millennium Challenge Corporation Stuart Alan Levey is the Chief Legal Officer and Executive Vice President of Oracle Corporation. From 2020-2021, he was the CEO of the Diem Association, and from 2012 to 2020, Levey was the Chief Legal Officer of HSBC Holdings in London, UK. Prior to joining HSBC, Levey was the U.S. Treasury Department’s first Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, serving in that role for more than six years under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. He also served in various capacities at the Department of Justice, including as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. Before joining the Justice Department, Levey was in private practice at the Washington law firm Miller, Cassidy, Larroca, & Lewin LLP, where he had a litigation practice with a special emphasis on white collar criminal defense. Levey clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Levey graduated from Harvard College, summa cum laude, and from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude.

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