Harun Nasrullah
Kazi Sabeel Rahman has been promoted to the political head of the White House regulations office, more than one and a half years after being appointed to an important position in President Joe Biden’s administration.
The Bangladeshi-American will serve as Associate Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), reports Bloomberg.
“[I am] Honoured and proud to continue to serve at OIRA with this fantastic team in my new role as Associate Administrator! Lots of important and urgent work ahead to facilitate effective, evidence-based, equitable policy on the most critical issues facing the country,” Sabeel tweeted on September 1.
The OIRA has enormous influence on how federal agencies implement the President’s agenda. It has not had a permanent head since Biden took office, so Sabeel became the top political appointee two years after he took office.
According to Senate records, no president has taken this long to nominate someone to lead OIRA since the position required Senate confirmation in the late 1980s.
The role will be especially critical should Democrats lose control of Congress. Without a working majority on Capitol Hill, Biden will have to push much of his ambitious agenda through regulation.
Sabeel is the former president of Demos, a think-tank, and an associate professor of law at Brooklyn Law School.
He has been a featured speaker at high-level events that have included US Vice President, Kamala Harris. Sabeel has also previously served as a special advisor on economic development strategy in New York City, where he grew up.
He earned his law degree and doctorate at Harvard University and his master’s degrees at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Sabeel’s father, Kazi Afzalur Rahman, served as an economic counsellor at the Bangladesh Mission in New York as a public servant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for five years until 1986.
After that, he also worked for the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). Afzalur worked at ESCAP’s regional office at the UN and retired two years ago as a director. One of Sabeel’s two sisters is a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund and the other lives in New York.
